Stop just using “Front end” or “Back end” to describe the Engineering you like
michellelim.org
michellelim.org
Also "product" unfortunately means something different, so also not the best naming... Instead I prefer to ask for clarification of the role reach. In fact just yesterday I was helping a friend who is job-hunting and I had to explain that front-end could mean since he was a bit concerned about "how deep" he needed to know React:
- A person who does a bit of everything, from mockups, design, layout, components, API calls, etc. These roles are normally a jack-of-all-trades type, where it's better to be balanced and know 6/10 of each of these skills instead of focusing only on one. It's characteristic of small/lean teams, SME and people working on internal tooling.
- A person who is an expert in React, working in a larger "front-end team" where there's a separated business person, designer, etc. and you only need to get those designs and build a great (Web)App. Knowing React and Javascript well is quite important. This is characteristic of large teams working on client-facing products.
The type I enjoy least is where you need to understand a dozen different systems to figure out why the twenty lines you wrote crash 5% more often than baseline, but only on Tuesdays.
Building a browser app is a totally different knowledge base than writing a CRUD API to power it.
This is coming from an EE gone web developer who now works as an embedded and hardware engineer. There are trade offs in engineering disciplines that you don’t generally find in highly abstracted web development environments.
Although the above may be technically correct, part of me thinks the word engineering might actually be a moving target. It isn't what it used to be, and perhaps the new definition will stick.
As a application developer you have the luxury of relying on the underlying frameworks to do most of the leg-work for you. As long as you follow basic principals within the framework you can have a reasonable degree of confidence that your application will run and the end product will probably be OK. Things like iOS development are so heavily streamlined that sticking to the docs will mean from a technical perspective the app should be fairly solid.
Of course, it does depend on the application because you could be solving complex problems that are outside of the framework, so I'm not dismissing the engineering definition entirely, but generally speaking I think most developers are developers, not engineers. Developers leverage existing systems and build on-top of them.
Juxtaposing the idea of a web or iOS developer with an electronic engineer that is building a physical product with a microcontroller. The application is written in a "bare-metal" embedded environment which generally only relies on a Hardware Abstraction Layer (which basically just maps memory locations and may provide initialization code for various peripherals) and virtually nothing else. The application will likely need to employ interrupt handlers with safety (Mutex/Semapores etc) that must execute within time restrictions or the system will crash, complex DMA buffering techniques and integration with other hardware using physical layer protocols (SPI, I2C, I2S, 802.11 WIFI, USB, etc). The transfer protocol chosen will have its own trade-offs, such as speed vs noise and then noise compensation techniques will need to be used such as increasing the spacing between PCB tracks, using ground planes etc, but these then also have trade-offs because your device may have space restrictions.
The list goes on for a while, and every decision that is made eventually enforces a limitation somewhere else in the system. Engineering (in my mind) is about the balancing of these decisions/limitations to ensure the system runs harmoniously and within the defined constraints.
Similarly, even on a team that does engineer a distributed system, only some of the team members do that sort of activity, the other members follow the set conventions so things work out. Eventually they could work their way up to doing 'real' engineering. I really don't like calling only some things engineering as much as I agree that software development doesn't have the rigor of traditional engineering fields.
What is "engineering"? Engineering is the use of scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items.
A software "engineer" is simply someone who make use of scientific principles and computer languages to build and/or maintain software.
> “Product-first” engineers are obsessed with using code to solve a user problem and they see code as just a means to an end.
> “Code-first” engineers are obsessed with the abstractions, architecture, tools and libraries in the code. Elegant code is the end.
> Product-first engineers map to “Product engineering”—building, launching and maintaining features that solve user problems. They often love being in the same room as designers and product managers to learn about users, and they love finding technical opportunities that can improve the product.
So the main line of reasoning is that Frontend vs Backend can paint you in a place where you don't fit. Even combining the Front/Back and Product/Infrastructure axes I still can't describe what I like to do: Platform/API development. That is taking an understanding of the product/business domain, factoring them down, implementing them with a code-first mindset. It isn't exactly elegant code being the end, but having composable interfaces that separate conceptually. Add to that supporting and working with product developers who tend to be frontend/mobile either in-house or third party and sometimes other platform developers.
Early in your career, Frontend/Backend with a particular framework/language will sufficiently filter your options, as you specialize you will tend to be more specific. There are many axes as you specialize, for instance I work with several datastores in great depth. Oddly the frameworks/languages that were good filters hardly matter anymore as the solutions tend to be easily represented in any. I'm more than competent with frontend but my interests and concerns would still be described as backend. I ignore any opportunity described as fullstack.
UX engineers are creating software for the express purpose of interacting with users, i.e. human beings, and having to deal with all the messiness that entails.
SX engineers are creating software to be used by software. Their focus is on API/SPI design, versioning, flexibility, discoverability and so forth.
> UX engineers are creating software for the express purpose of interacting with users, i.e. human beings, and having to deal with all the messiness that entails.
In the latest 5 years the UX are creating software for the express purpose of telemetry and destroying users experience. Every two months there's a major interface redesign. Every two months someone thinks that the users are idiots and need no configuration options while they make grey text on white or black background.
> SX engineers are creating software to be used by software. Their focus is on API/SPI design, versioning, flexibility, discoverability and so forth.
Discoverability is dead. Help is not in fashion anymore and when there is some help available it needs a web browser and an internet connection.
Just clicks?