Background story: Recently I got a promotion (yay! 🥳), vouched by the VP, and one Director of Engineering praising me as the most knowledgeable, as well as the go-to dev, for anything related to React in our company.
Now, the question: if you were in that same spot, would you go all-in Front-End, or use that edge to invest time and energy to brush up the Back-End?
Top comments (1)
My train of thought: I have very mixed feelings about it.
I have done my share of BE, but that was many years ago and it's amazing how fast you forget something (or maybe it's just selective memory from spending so much time on the FE). Right now I'm reading a book on Rails and enjoying it.
My Team Lead also noted to me personally that it would be great if I could do BE work, although it's not necessary at all. He also said there's no problem of me spending one full day doing Back-End stuff per week.
Our codebase is quite big, so I believe that experience as well as the help from my teammates would be quite worth it.
And, for those who say that "you can't be great at both at the same time", I only partially agree as our Team Lead is great with both, leaning towards the BE. I would say his BE is top-notch, but his FE is great and if in doubt, he will ask me.
So I wouldn't mind being the same as him but leaning towards the FE. Granted, he's been at it for more than a decade, but I would have the advantage of a great mentor.
On the other hand, after more than 2 years later of focusing only on React, coming from a C++ background, it's been great to cement my foundations and I feel this may be my passion.