I made the mistake once of dabbling in frontend, and have been pigeonholed into frontend ever since. Because frontend experience is seen as a joke, it's tough to transition out of because nobody is impressed by anything you've done. Talk about scaling distributed systems, Kubernetes, and writing C and that's seen as legitimate, respectable work. Talk about the sleek and performant web applications you built that work on all devices, and not only is no one impressed - it almost seems like it's pitied like the engineering equivalent of working at McDonald's or building a website for your grandma.
At least in the past, getting a frontend role was relatively easy with minimal BS (no Leetcode hazing). Now as I interview around, I'm surprised to be getting rejected from these frontend roles (no feedback of course) despite completing all these elementary CRUD app coding challenges, and having used React since 2014. It almost feels like my work experience was for nothing. Few of my accomplishments sound impressive to anyone because building a web app is considered trivial and not "real" software engineering. But scaling a real-time distributed system to millions of requests per second? Now that's real engineering.
I'm sick of being seen as a second-tier engineer and not being respected for my work, so it seems the logical thing to do is to transition into backend roles - or at worst full-stack. There's no sense in investing in work that's not respected.
It seems like there's a serious problem with elitism in this industry, and I don't think it's at all warranted. But I'm sick of fighting it.
Thing is I never cared about frontend vs. backend, I just liked building things and solving problems. But the elitism in this industry and these absurd interview processes with these robotic multi-hour coding challenges and no feedback make me can't wait to leave this damn industry so I can build whatever the hell I want without having to worry if some elitist snob considers it "real engineering".
Please do let me know if I'm wrong in my analysis and conclusions, and would love to hear any advice on how to escape this frontend ceiling treadmill.
1. Reflecting in what would be missing on how are you selling yourself so you can reposition the product of you as frontend software engineer. Are you making it easy enough to perceive that is a great opportunity to have you in an engineering team? What do you have in your control right now that can make that perception more overt?
2. Be the CTO of a x10 product (niche would be easier), raise a seed round with a co-founder and show the kind of value you were always talking about.
Both paths needs you resisting to become resentful (making neuroticism go up) because people will sense the negative vibe from miles away and intuitively reject being close to you even if they don't understand the details of why (just general impression).
PS: I'm a fullstack with more time spent in backends, and when I have to show a portfolio it's almost always the frontend that can be displayed to cause some kind of quick fast good impression. Backend stuff is always harder to show/prove.
Frontend is largely a solved problem. It's offloaded to frameworks like Bootstrap and countless others. In 2023 you really should not be hand-crafting your own theme, unless you really enjoying doing that and enjoy the challenge of it.
Only the last one.
Unfortunately, it has been completely ruined thanks to Leetcode and interviewing has now been turned into an entire industry which not even the interviewers themselves can solve the questions they are asking for without Googling or ChatGPT.
I don't think there is a fix nor will it change, but you might as well go for self-employment, which is much better than going through the interview madness game.
> Please do let me know if I'm wrong in my analysis and conclusions, and would love to hear any advice on how to escape this frontend ceiling treadmill.
You are spot on.
The pontification in this industry has been quite visible in the past few years. Now that the cheap easy money and access to capital is gone, the interview process is now a complete slot machine game which there are lots of losers and whoever knows the owner of the casino can rig the game so that they win at every spin.
Far from dead-end, I think front end is a much more dynamic field that offers much more career options. You are essentially translating extraordinarily complicated engineering solutions and translating them into human design. This makes you valuable in many, many more fields because the skills you need are of broader use.
Front end people rise the ranks all of the time, but usually not through engineering departments. Because it's such a human-oriented skill, your career ceiling is determined by your interpersonal skills. I know lots of frontend engineers who have risen to prominence through Consulting, UX, Marketing, etc.
I think your current benchmark is wrong - you probably shouldn't care about being the king of the greybeards.
At the places I've worked, it's because that's where the majority of the beginners are, and lots of mistakes are made there. But there are some excellent FE developers, who also know other technologies and are excited about them. Those are the ones I want to hire!
I've also seen lots of FE out-sourced to small companies all over the world. They work fast and efficiently, and their engineers are usually contracted for a limited time.
>> or at worst full-stack
What's wrong with full-stack? :(
Engineering (whether FE or BE) exists to solve a business problem and drive profit. The free VC money raining down in the last decade made some people forget that and even created perverse incentives where complexity was sometimes seen as an asset (to solicit more VC money) - it made it possible (and normal) to keep the "builders" around and intentionally make the house more and more complex so it's intentionally never finished and the builders have a justification to remain there and pocket part of said VC money.
The free VC money has now dried up. Businesses are back at chasing profit (those who can't will go out of business altogether) and are cutting back anything they can. All the "builders" were suddenly let go and the FE market is now saturated, which is why you're seeing so many issues with finding a role (the leetcode thing is just a symptom of this problem - LC gives them a solution to filter through the hundreds of resumes they're getting - it's not a good solution, but it's cheaper than manual review). Your issues with job search have little to do with "respect" and more with the market being saturated. The Leetcode test you said you completed successfully in another comment and then got ghosted? Someone else completed it just as well, but was a better talker (or bullshitter) during the actual interview.
The frontend market might be the first hit, but eventually the same will apply to other verticals. I suspect cloud-focused DevOps might be the next hit as businesses finally get tired of paying 100x margins into Jeff Bezos' pocket. Retraining to backend or whatever field you feel is more respected now might buy you some time but ultimately the same outcome will happen.
This doesn't mean frontend experience isn't valuable, but you should stop seeing it as "frontend" vs "backend" and start seeing it in terms of what business value you can contribute because that's ultimately the only thing businesses want to be paying for. A lot of solutions however definitely will include a backend component so gaining some experience there would be beneficial and would put you in a good position to deliver end-to-end solutions.