Ranting as a Front-End Developer: Skills, Expectations, and the Full Stack Journey

You graduate from college and get out in the job market. You have done Leetcode or CodeChef or just basic DSA and Algo..!!

You sit in an interview and get through it by doing everything you could do right. Your stars are aligned, and you get your first job..!!

Elated, you tell your parents all about it, it’s a good salary package for a fresher, and the brand is also good.

It’s your first day. They tell you you are going to be a front-end Engineer. You will be working on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Angular, and whatnot..!!

Every day, there is a new framework. Vue is the new guy in the corner one day, and the next day it’s Aurelia. They all claim it’s going to be the next big thing..!!

You learn one new library/framework, do some POC, and add it to your resume. Because, you see, it’s a game of keywords. You have learned enough SEO to understand that it’s all about Keywords..! So, you add SEO as an additional skill in your resume.

With time, you have become better; you can tell if a font is not correct or if it’s different by one pixel from the design..!!

Oh, design, you have come a long way from Photoshop to Figma. You have seen Sketch be the rage and then die a slow death. You have got a great design sense by now, so much so you can train a fresher designer who is a design school grad about design sense.

Oh, don't forget accessibility; you know all about it, yet somehow you forget to add it to your resume. It’s such a crucial skill, but you miss adding it because not everyone cares about it unless a client escalates about it.

All said and done, you have 100 skills in your resume and less space to put them all in, so you add most of them in your LinkedIn and ask your friends and colleagues to endorse you because that’s going to give you some additional visibility..!!

It’s been five years since you have been a front-end developer, and you are good at your craft. Master of JavaScript and Pro at React, but you are sick of waiting for the middleware team to provide you with the API endpoint till the last day of the release.

Everyone is asking you what’s taking so long, as you have been given the design a month in advance, but no one seems to understand that you need to wire the APIs, test the fail case, add handlers, and whatnot..!!

Sick of it, you decide to write your APIs. Oh, come on, how hard writing a controller could be. It’s just api/bla/bla..!!

You write APIs, and you write the front end, you wire them together, and you feel now you are a full stack developer. But no one tells you that there is more to writing APIs than writing controllers.

And the expectations, oh, don’t get me started, now you are expected to write APIs, front end, and everything in the same amount of time you used to take to build a part of it( the front end).

While juggling between the front end and APIs, you realize you are already a veteran in the field, and the job market has changed a lot.

While they are asking DSA and Algo in the interviews, you have forgotten all of it to keep up with frameworks and libraries.

In between all the chaos of DSA, Algo, system design, accessibility, frameworks, and whatnot, You realize you are back to where you started.

In the quest of being a front-end developer, you become everything but a front-end developer.

Regards,

A front-end developer

That's the rant!

Feel free to comment on how you like my blog or shoot me an email at [email protected] If you have any queries, and I will try to answer.

You can also visit my website to read some of the articles at nandan.dev

Stay tuned & connect with me on my social media channels. Make sure to subscribe to my newsletter to get regular updates on my upcoming posts.

Twitter | Instagram | Github | Website

Also published here.