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Discussion on: Backend Engineering Skills Are Emphasized Too Heavily for Principal Engineers

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stiby profile image
stiby • Edited

What's missing here is the concept of a T shaped developer.

Think of the vertical line as a deep understanding of a single area like front end (design, components, accessibility, responsive, UX etc), networks (routing, spanning trees, redundancy, capacity, monitoring, etc), databases (structure, scale, transactions, sql/nosql, redundancy, scalability, monitoring, consistency, etc. ), micro services (api, server/serverless, messaging, events, scalability, availability etc) , cloud infrastructure, etc... Every area has more depth than most people appreciate.

Now the horizontal line is breadth of skills which are not so deep, so the backend dev who knows about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript may come across more T shaped.

My advice is don't over emphasis your depth in a single area and work on developing the wider skills. Remember as a good senior it's more about working with a skilled team who have depths you do not and not so much about being better than your peers.