Does it make sense to move from frontend to full-stack role?

Posted by avoid_pro@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 11 comments

I am seeking for advice from people that considered this path or managed to actually move to full-stack role. I am frontend developer with +5 YOE and I work with React + TypeScript. Nothing fancy or ground-breaking, just typical frontend role with a most popular tech stack in tech company.

My problem is that I can’t find more challenging tasks. Frontend is constantly bombarded with web features and improvements. Constant wars between “Next or Tanstack?”. Developers fighting about React best practises. Super annoying JS errors (thank you TS for static types, we have at least some kind of compile time protection) and sluggish animations trying to mimic native mobile apps behaviour (never gonna happen due to how browser calculates styles). And people always pushing for latest libraries instead of having stable and predictable software (some people are just over-engineering stuff to the roof).

Everything pushes me to explore something new. I am feeling stuck in current position and I don’t know how improve as developer. I know that it will be matter of time till full-stack becomes same old s***. But I want to improve and get better at this craft, because I enjoy typing code and solving complex problems.

Finally, current market is rough - I am seeing way less job for pure frontend role and more posting for backend/full-stack jobs.

Does it make sense? How to tailor my resume if I don’t have any backend experience?

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Dangerous-Sale3243@reddit

Yes. Pure frontend/backend is a thing of the past these days. The whole point of a frontend dev was you would have one guy who would stay on top of the rapidly-changing Ember/Angular/React ecosystem. That ecosystem has largely stabilized and with AI you dont need to spend days learning the latest syntactic sugar to do form validation or whatever.

2itb0x@reddit

Many companies may have an opening for a full-stack role to cast the widest net possible but in reality they really just want a front-end engineer who isn't afraid to make updates to the API.

That means that "fewer front end roles" in the market doesn't necessarily mean that there's less front-end work.

If the Full stack role is for a Product Engineering role, it's gonna be the same kind of work whether it was labeled front-end vs. full-stack, IMO. I doubt many orgs want to create a technical boundary on client vs. server at this point.

Noobsauce9001@reddit

I'll say this - I'm a 12 YoE frontend developer who's been laid off for almost 18 months. I haven't failed a technical interview (aside from two leetcodes) in 11 months. The competition is fierce and even when these roles are mainly frontend, I'm always being passed on for candidates with demonstrated professional backend experience.

Essentially decent knowledge is not enough in today's market - folks need demonstrated professional experience. The list of those secondary experiences a job required, and I was passed up for not having:

Leadership / Software architect: x3
Backend: (Postgres, .NET, Springboot, Kafka) countless
Strong graphic design, UI/UX: x2
Devops: (AWS, Azure) x3

RandyHoward@reddit

How do you know you’re being passed on for candidates with back end experience? They don’t typically disclose information about the person who was offered the job.

doomsby@reddit

Yes

I went from graphic design, to front end, then back end and full stack. At times it sucks because some employers will expect you to do the work of 3 people for the salary of one. But it’s worth it at least because it gives you more opportunities in the market and should make it easier to find a job than being specialized in one area.

I have been laid off for nearly 18 months straight, got two more rejections today. I had 12 years of consistent development employment prior to this. Grab non frontend work while you can, learn from my struggles.

My last role was pure frontend, I keep getting rejected for not having professional backend experience. Pure frontend roles are near impossible for me to find, they always require deep knowledge or experience with one additional thing like:

Backend (Postgres, Kafka/Event driven, .NET, Springboot), Go
Devops, AWS
Graphic design UI/UX (Strong art skills, UI/UX, portfolio sites pieces, the sort who's handy with a drawpad and graphic design tools)
Leadership and/or software architect experience.
AI engineering (both using AI tools, as well as using AI as part of a feature like LangChain, anything Machine Learning adjacent, etc.)

This has been my life. These are the only roles I'm seeing, and even if I show up with demoable projects and strong knowledge on a topic they reject me for someone who has done it professionally. Get non frontend work!

UnderstandingDry1256@reddit

This post is like flashback from 4 years ago haha.

sneaky-pizza@reddit

Yeah, everyone has to be full now it seems

epoci@reddit

It would be easiest if you could start transitioning in your current project. But where I worked where there are no frontend centric teams but whete each team having people that can do full development it's very easy to just start picking up more and more backend work and slowly transition. If you have a lot of years on frontend, doing things quickly shouldn't be an issue so you can usually pick up some of the backend load without hurting timelines.

I have started as full stack and slowly transitioned to fully backend. And I will confirm your intuition, the problem space in backend is significantly more interesting, it's way more like a puzzle with technical constraints. Complexity wise frontend I think often is harder, but it's not the fun kind of complexity. In backend systems a lot of the complexity ultimately comes from physical limitations of the metal you run it on, in frontend a lot of the complexity is because the tooling/frameworks were made to support one way of doing things and you have to produce something slightly different, conceptually simple things become technically challenging.

Exciting_Variation56@reddit

Yes it is.

I'm doing the same from the other side, backend to full stack.

You point to personal projects or make them, and you express what you did here -- you want more challenging problems.