Can I Have a Career as a Frontend Engineer?

I hear this concern from some of my team members: "I talked to my friends in software and they told me it's better to work on the backend or full-stack to have a fast-tracked career."

I do agree that there are generally more full-stack or backend engineering jobs than purely frontend jobs. I also agree that there's a general perception that frontend is easy / bunch of scripts / not real engineering, yada yada… However, I think it's a short-sighted view.

The engineering challenge of frontend

Consider Google Maps. You can use it on your browser or natively on the phone. You can embed it within your own app on these platforms. You can ask it for navigation directions for walking, biking, or driving, or ask it to show realtime transit and traffic information. If you take a detour, it'll show you new directions on the fly. You can see the map view, the 3D view, or a camera view of a location. At night, you can see dark-mode. It'll show you how many lanes you have on a road, and how fast you can legally go, in realtime. It'll let you share your location in realtime with your buddy. You can search using your voice and it'll also give you turn by turn voice guidance. And that's not even mentioning avoiding toll-free roads, u-turns, etc.

Very few engineers I know can architect a system such as Google Maps. Since a lot of engineers choose the path of backend engineering, it's incredibly hard to find frontend engineers who can pull high impact projects.

Why frontend can accelerate your career

If you consider yourself above average, you should not follow the path of the average. Instead, if you like building visual products and obsessing about delighting millions or billions of users, you can have a very rewarding and fast-paced career in frontend engineering.

• Most of your engineering knowledge is transferrable, irrespective of what part of the stack you work on
• You'll learn to work with people, delight customers, and build systems that are robust, scalable, secure, compliant, and testable
• You can move into a different part of the stack at will as long as your foundation is strong
• Modern frontend engineering is complex but powered by innovative tools
• Most of the tooling is open-source and the community is vibrant with lots of conferences and meetups around the world
• As a frontend engineer, you can create an outsized impact and differentiate yourself from the masses