> Ms. Ellis, who left the company in 2014, says that almost all of the female software engineers at Google worked in front-end jobs while men worked in back-end roles.
That seems both highly dubious and easy to verify.
That seems both highly dubious and easy to verify.
This wasn't the only reason that I ultimately turned down the Google offer (and spent so long in team selection after passing the interview), but it was certainly one of them.
There are some back-end teams at Google that have lots of women; Chrome security comes to mind (I don't know if that's "back-end" in the common sense of the term, but it was the sort of team I was interested in). But I don't find it particularly dubious that these are the exception and not the rule.
You could easily end up with 'server side' work, which exists solely to augment or support a UI, and is not part of the 'core' business applications/services.
At a mid-sized startup, the front end developers are probably also responsible for Django / Rails, and the back end developers are responsible for things like managing the Hadoop cluster and the machine learning components.
And at a large company, anything built with existing libraries might be considered front end, whereas back end might be creating a new database or whatever. I don't claim to know how Google works, but as companies get bigger the back end tends to go further back, and so the 'front end' encompasses more also.
They still hire frontend devs. Those frontend devs still do front-end JS with libraries. Some of them work on in-house libraries, but their focus is still narrow. Same for backend - they use the industry standard term to mean the industry standard.
However, the differentiation of teams/departments is much higher. To take on your argument directly, a project to create a new database would have software engineers but be on an infrastructure team. They don't call themselves backend engineers or recruit backend engineers, they call themselves software engineers and recruit people with skills writing system software.
At Google, the "frontend" work also usually includes the server which serves the frontend code - this means engineers need to be not only capable at UI development, but also be familiar with the Java systems that exist at Google.
From this perspective, frontend at Google is indeed similar to a full stack role at most startups running on AWS or GCP. Backend at Google is more like working on AWS itself.