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

 
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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. :)