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Discussion on: Should I become a Front-End or Back-End developer?

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bendtherules profile image
Abhas Bhattacharya

Sorry, but it seems like a fluffy post to me.

  1. Author has not named any of those areas of work - so you can't really search for one of those paths or visualize a career path. Most of them would fall somewhere between a Systems Engineer and some specialization of Hardware/Electronics engineer.

  2. Most of the job openings are nowadays in frontend/backend role - which i think is the main reason why people think of these 2 paths. Backend/SDE engineers can then work on some of the system-level stuff depending on the company and requirements.
    If you want to stay in a specific specialization like mentioned in the article, research the job market first.

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darkain profile image
Vincent Milum Jr

This was all addressed in the initial post.

These jobs do indeed exist, but they're less common, thus they generally pull a higher payout. Why? Because they're harder to fill, because there are less candidates applying for them. But this also means there is less competition, so the jobs tend to be easier to land.

As far as hardware/electronics engineer. Yes, a couple of the examples could be labeled as such, but that's missing the overall point of the article. Countless other examples in the article talk about tools developers, library developers, component developers. This is all purely software. But that still defeats the entire point, which is to look at the entire world around us, and see how much of it is handled by code, and exploring the possibility of being that person who writes that code.

The article is a thought experiment, not a technical resource guide on how to find one particular job.

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bendtherules profile image
Abhas Bhattacharya

Won't most library developers (working in a company) have a title very similar to SDE?
By backend role, SDE is the position most people refer to - which has a familiar recruitment process and then you might land up working on some library. Its very hard (i would imagine) to plan your whole career exclusively as a library developer.

The point i am trying to make is - many of these are sub-track of backend developer track, because of how recruitment process works. Sure, it's good to think about them, but very hard to plan your career around one specific sub-track.

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darkain profile image
Vincent Milum Jr

Not necessarily. For instance, in my current role, I'm the lead database administrator for a company. Nowhere in the job description or hiring process was programming apart of it. However, the role was mostly open-ended to "solve things as you see fit". There were some internal tools already in place, as well as 3rd party tools. I lead the initiative to replace the external tools with internal tools that better met the company's need, as well as re-write the internal tools. This lead to the creation of some re-usable libraries that are now available to other teams.

And this is a trend I've repeated countless times in the tech industry. My first "real job" ~16 years ago, I was hired to simply do data entry for an early ecommerce company. I wrote some code there to automate most of the process.

None of this is what would traditionally be thought of as "back end" development, as none of this had anything to do with web dev at all. These would be more categorized as "process automation" which historically landed under titles such as Systems Analysis and Design.

There are many paths to becoming a dev, and many destinations that are not even remotely related to web dev. :)