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Comment by d0100 | Hacker News Reader

> I am an expert Frontend Engineer now

I wonder how much you know more than a Fullstack Engineer?

I ask because I am a generalist "fullstack" and want to know what kind of things an "expert" should know in the frontend that would make them unable to do fullstack personal projects

From my POV, unless you are working on very new tech like WebGl, Wasm, etc, everything else frontend is pretty much resolved. Would "expert" mean the breadth of knowledge on frontend frameworks? Writing JS compilers? Ajax?

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I'm also interested in this, but I'm more interested in what you need to say and do to convince other people you're an expert.

> everything else frontend is pretty much resolved

Has it? The technologies will change again. Pretty soon, if I have to guess. What's valuable here are the concepts that are universally applicable and have been since it was called client programming in the 70s: state management, rendering, API integrations, architecture.

> to be an expert

You should be able to offer solutions to problems impromptu. You should be dependeable in a wider-group meeting involving business or other competencies to represent what does the frontend say about it.

This means having knowledge and experience to offer solutions without googling.

Beyond that, you also need to be on top of the latest (not the newest) standards to follow. You need to stay up-to-date and filter through the waterfall of sh*t trends in the industry, to know what's actually relevant.

While doing all of that, you need to maintain your past/fundamental knowledge...nitty gritty details, to help your colleagues.

You need to do all of this while (most likely) being representative spokesperson/front for a frontend project at your day job.

I interviewed Full Stack Engineers many times. They usually cannot finish a coding challenge that is entirely frontend. The same challenge for me, it is all about how fast I can type. I can narrate the code and architecture I am writing as I code it

As with everything in life, full stack is a spectrum between backend and frontend leaning extremes. So, my point above is definitely a generalisation.

You might be super-sharp, a unicorn, or a frontend-leaning fullstack developer. It may not apply to you.

Taking this into consideration, there are worse examples of fullstackers too. Ones that don't know of spread operator, or can't type an object without googling first. that is around-or-below a junior-level competence in frontend.

Then there are those in the middle, who won't be up-to-date on how to use hooks, contexts, or be out-of-touch with concept of reducers or state management...but will work at the competence level of a mid-level frontender.

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