Why will you take the front-end path? What it has to offer? First of all, I can say to you this path is long, but it’s worthy!
I've been working with front-end development for some time and today I feel a great pleasure to be part of this team. But after all, what is front-end and what it has to offer?
Front-end is the area responsible for turn into code and give life to that beautiful static design — put simply, it is the dev guy who takes care of your website's/blog's/web system's interface and usability; the CSS guy.
Today we're living in the Information Age. And with a huge convergency for web apps and systems, great on-premises platforms are turning into cloud available applications.
All this change plus those new services which already are born into the web ecosystem puts the front-end developer role in evidence, leading to a huge demand for new trained developers to manage this all. A good front-end dev can make your product such an another result on Google search or make it a stand out, attractive result to your customers.
Talking from the dev perspective, beyond the projects you would be taking part on and all the networking you'll develop, the front-end universe could offer you:
1) Contact with fancy technologies
In the world of development, in general, you'll have contact with several and wonderful languages, tools and platforms (PaaS, SaaS, IaaS) whose make your job easier and more flexible.
Today it's such a mistake thinking that front-end development limits itself to HTML + CSS! The technical and knowledge level for front-end devs gets higher each day — to be a successfull dev, you must master HTML, CSS and JavaScript (only jQuery isn't enough!), have a good design sense (it's a good differential if you have some experience with graphical software), have a good knowledge about projects architecture and infrastructure, design patterns (not everything in life is a singleton)… This list gets bigger every single day…
2) Contact with a huge community
Today the web devs community (front + back) is very large and some fantastic people are inserted in those communities. Github, forums, Facebook + Telegram groups, there are several channels to knowledge's dissemination. It's very difficult to have a doubt or to find a problem which cannot be solved in a short amount time with such quality support.
3) Acknowledgment and feedback
All the development segments have acknowledgement, logically. But I believe that it's such a front-end's glamour — the people really view and interact with your stuff. The users will click the button you've coded, they will like (or not) the website layout, animations and usability — and at this point the feedback is really fast!
Any change you make will affect the user's navigation (either visual or performance stuff) and it can improve or worsen your website's or blog's conversion rate. All the actions made on the applications' visual layer (where front-end devs spent 90% of their time) will generate chain reactions that can be seen in short time slots.
4) Job Vacancies
Today it's really hard to a front-end dev find yourself without a job. There's a "we're hiring" ad at every corner — either JR, PL or SR — not mentioning the freelancer opportunities. Technology companies are investing really hard and valuing each day more this area, because if the product/service being offered is really good rated and it has a simple interface with easy assimilation to use, your visitor will become a customer in a very short time range; and that's good for everyone involved.
Particularly, every day I get about 5 to 10 job vacancies on my email, requesting trained front-end devs with a specific mastery (beyond HTML + CSS) — React, Angular, Vue, WordPress, Mobile Hybrid Apps, Mobile First… Besides those jobs you can get on websites like Freelancer and Fiverr.
Whether in a startup or in an enterprise environment the front-end dev role has great benefits and an incredible journey to offer you! To be a successful player in this field, you only need to have willpower and creativity!
P.S.: EBANX is always looking for new devs! Take a look at our carrers page and come dream big with us!
Top comments (4)
I think that for all those reasons you mentioned, and more, I choose to step away from front-end development, after many years of full stack
I mean because of the other side of the reasons, the not so great consequences
Most of those you mentioned are for back-end developers. The new fancy front-end stuff are mainly not new, just based on old technologies. Even the ShadowDom is not a DOM just a bunch of objects.
That is the problem, the quality bar is lowered each year, because of the big influx of new developers. Just look at the NPM source code if you want to have nightmares.
That is the problem, similar with the designers feedback hell. Everyone thinks is an expert at UX/UI/Design and they will not keep their unsolicited, unprofessional feedback for themselves.
Lots of unoccupied positions means the companies lower their hiring bars, it means the quality of the products suffer, legacy projects will be even worst to maintain. Also you will be surprised but new devs have a hard time finding jobs, because everyone wants at least 2-3 yrs experience, I guess mainly because they have payed projects but lack in work force.
Many new positions also means that many juniors will not have mentors around, creating more problems on the way. When you forget your history, you will repeat all its mistakes.
It also means that the current devs must take more and more projects, with less and less time. This leads to other problems like lack of a learning culture, no time to do postmortems and reviews, less time to worry about performance and security .... you got the point.
That's an interesting perspective but I think that you may be missing the bigger picture. I prefer front-end because it offers me a reason to use it creatively. Back-end doesn't provide me with what I enjoy most. Manipulating data, while very important, is mundane in my view. I recently deployed an app that I designed and coded. I seriously doubt many back-end devs could do it .
This is the thing that turns me down from being a front end dev (actually I'm quite dull when it comes to design and creativity). I'm stuck in a forever loop of backend hell.
P.S.: I love what I do