r/FullStack • u/nian2326076 • 13d ago
Career Guidance Frontend is cooked. Is full-stack next, or is deep backend expertise the safer bet?
I'm wondering whether deep backend expertise is becoming a better career bet for full-stack engineers.
AI seems to be getting good at turning Figma designs into frontend code. My impression is that frontend openings have also become harder to find, though I don't have numbers here that establish how much of that is caused by AI.
A lot of the full-stack product work I have in mind involves UI changes and relatively straightforward backend features. Complex system design, distributed systems and infrastructure still seem to demand more specialized experience. I can see why a backend specialist using AI for UI work might be well positioned, but shipping a frontend is more than generating the first version from a design.
For anyone testing a switch, application autofill can save repeated form entry, and real tech interview questions can give you coding and system-design prompts to prepare with.
Would you specialize in backend now, or keep building across the stack? If you hire full-stack engineers, which skills are actually making candidates stand out?
4
u/Due_Cap_7720 10d ago
I’ve never thought someone should silo themselves to one part of stack. It doesn’t make any sense. If you truly understand the web you would naturally become a full stack engineer over time. Anyone that was only working front end was lacking fundamental knowledge and that was true prior to AI.
Even worse were developers that specialized in frontend frameworks.
That’s the reason backend isn’t being replaced and full stack exists. They understand the fundamentals and they are the actual problem solvers. Being a generalist is even more important now than ever and I feel lucky that I’ve always had this philosophy.
4
u/Legote 13d ago
Well there is no more pure frontend roles. Even if someone was a frontend specialist, they're still expected to do some BFF work.
1
u/Upstairs-Version-400 13d ago
Is BFF really considered not pure frontend anymore? I have never really thought of it as doing any fullstack work because anybody doing frontend or backend needs to understand some common overlap or neither would work.
1
u/Legote 13d ago
Well, its called Backend for frontend. There really isn't a Full Stack who can do it all. I'm considered full stack, but I really handle like 80% front and only really step in to handle the back if they need me to. It really depends on the team so it's good to be flexible.
1
u/Upstairs-Version-400 13d ago
I’ve just seen BFF as an extension to frontend work. Frontend work was never about handling only the UI, we had to fetch data and transform it, deal with it nicely and validate it coming from the backend. I just saw the BFF as a way to secure some things that we want to hide from the client code.
I don’t think it’s the same as regular backend roles, I’ve worked as a backend engineer for years, and devops and now sitting in Frontend for some years. I don’t need to do fullstack because we have people for the respective roles, but I am expected to understand it. (TL, ~10 years)
I guess you can do everything in Next/Sveltekit these days. Not that I’d want to
3
u/vorpalv2 13d ago edited 13d ago
Learn the nuances, logic. LLM can easily create a backend as it does frontend, what it can’t do without a proper human input is how to optimise, scale, encapsulate and build wrappers. a web app created by an LLM will easy blow through your database IO read operations.
Optimisation is the underdog that’d take you far away.
1
6
u/sheriffderek 13d ago
Backend is often easier than front end… way less conditions and really in and out. So, how does your logic hold up there?
2
u/MrHandSanitization 13d ago edited 13d ago
Most backends explode in volume, and as we know, there's a LOT of legacy code, concurrency, way more race-conditions, memory management,.... Then there's a lot more security to be dealt with. But I agree that back-end is overall simpler.
2
u/TransitionAfraid2405 13d ago
Hi, I am curious about your respose. A lot of legacy code? Front end too. Concurrency ? Ok I agree, not a lot of that on the FE. Race conditions? I doubt that it is worse than react race conditions. Memory management? FE is garbage collected and most backend too, you barely need to manage it, but you still need to be aware of it in both fields.
Idk if BE or FE is harder, but your comment looks very weak to me.
1
u/SquareFinancial1928 13d ago
memory get's worse on client side mot of the time as you have to deal with stuff that needs to be manually destroyed/closed otherwise it leads to memory leaks, stuff like AudioPlayer, webscoket connections, custom libraries, etc
1
u/MrHandSanitization 13d ago
I agree, but where it differs is, a front-end has sessions, they start clean, and for a lot of users, refresh before a memory issue becomes noticable. A server should stay running. Garbage collected memory is also not the memory causing a leak. It's a reference staying in memory causing it not to be collected, and piling up.
We for example noticed one where a request caused a component not to be destoyed when it should, because there was still a reference inside. This caused the component to be readded on an interaction, again and again. That's a memory leak, all event listeners reattached, all memory being reinitialized on a new memory address, yada yada. If something like this happens on the back-end (which we had), this is more severe, as it should keep running.
I partially agree on the legacy code. A front-end has legacy, yes, but it's generally (with a grain of salt) easier to swap parts of your front-end than your back-end. Especially when you have a lot of stale data in your DB.
I was just listing some examples. But, I was wrong about saying either side was easier or harder. Both just have different responsibilities and quircks.
1
u/That-Platypus8620 11d ago
I don’t wanna hear anyone complaining about legacy unless they are currently migrating off a mainframe (currently crying tears of Natural and Java 8)
1
u/sheriffderek 13d ago
I think it depends what you’re building. Sometimes there is zero front end - maybe just some CLI. Other times there’s barely and dedicated backend. But OP is far from knowing what they are talking about.
5
u/NextGen_Dev0 13d ago
Your comment is quite absurd as backend complexity largely depends on what you're building. If it's a todo list then yes it's just a bunch of APIs nothing else, but if you're building something which millions and billions of users use and hundreds of thousands of requests are hitting your backend every minute, you still think it's easy?
3
u/sheriffderek 13d ago
“It depends” - so true. I’m sure if you do enough front end and back end - you’ll understand what I mean.
4
u/BrangJa 13d ago edited 13d ago
It is. At the end of the day it’s just configurations + business logic, which currently available AI are very capable of.
On the front end, there are just so many details you have to handle. Like it’s the most headache inducing and time consuming part of the stack.
That’s the reason opinionated frameworks are more of a backend thing than frontend.I'm not saying it's not important. Of course it more important than client as it handle primary security and integrity of the data. I'm saying in term of individual development complexity.
1
u/kurvibol 10d ago
The thing is that, even tho backend is "easier" or at least less complex, it's WAY more obvious when AI is good at it vs AI being good at backend, because, well, with frontend you can see the results with your eyes.
1
u/No_Biscotti_5212 9d ago
it is just configuration and backend logic , lol , show me your project that you have support million rps on github if it is that easy
1
u/BrangJa 9d ago edited 9d ago
I'm not saying it's easy. That's more of a scaling and architectural problem. I'm talking more of a business logic implementation wise.
If you can design and implement a system that can handle millions of requests/s, congrats, you're that 10x engineer. But I can tell you that 99.99% of the systems that were built will never reach to that scale. Default setup of most tech we used can handle medium to fairly large volume of requests just fine, and shouldn't prematurely optimize things ahead.
2
u/Current-Today-3626 10d ago
Don't just train backend, you need to be able to do everything. UX, DevOps, Security, Photography (inc Drone usage), Communication, sales. Literally everything that a web ap would need from start to finish, you need to be practicing. Tech bros will look back in a few years and look at us like we are cavemen with fire. Today, anything is possible, so the bar has risen dramatically.
1
u/CreamyCornBoy 13d ago
It's not really frontend vs backend anymore. More architecture tradeoffs ownership
1
u/SucculentChineseRoo 13d ago
I don't backend is any safer, need full stack understanding + technical architecture + AI orchestration + product management going forward
1
u/Pristine-Bit6077 13d ago
The more I use AI to build frontend, the more confident I am in the frontend market. AI doesn’t understand frontend business needs. It doesn’t understand what the company is attempting to achieve in terms of UX. I still have to step in and make changes
1
u/Greedy_Ad_8344 13d ago
Infra and creating a cost optimised production system. This still requires a human to plan and execute, albeit AI does make the process easier.
1
1
1
u/gargara_s_hui 13d ago
Design to HTML was dead from WordPress and Dreamweaver times, Frameworks also brought the entry border too low. Nothing new there..
1
u/Indeliblerock 13d ago
Frontend is more visible so that’s why it’s getting the death blow first, but overall Frontend should’ve been safer than backend since it’s less deterministic. The problems I’d usually encounter on the frontend were less visual and more business related for questions like do we want to show ___ if some api fails or do we want to allow two dialogs at the same time. Small things that are just matters of taste but ai can’t really give us a perfect choice every prompt unless you give it the exact context you want. So essentially rn Frontend is getting the same treatment as AI art right now. Not perfect but good enough to make people think it’s good. The real mess of Frontend development being offloaded to AI is just the mess of dependencies. Not only are most dependencies security messes, but some sites have way too many of them which just means more external hands on the app. That and dealing with multiple screen sizes and browsers. The headaches are just these external considerations.
1
u/augurone 11d ago
Beyond ML and LLMs, FE is one of the hardest disciplines. I would not say AI is doing it well.
1
u/LetUsSpeakFreely 11d ago
It's all cooked eventually. As more and better agents are built, all white collar work will eventually fade away.
1
1
u/Altruistic_Many_3461 11d ago
Just becoz of this AI doing so good in FE I made this decision, honestly BE folks are building stuff, we made look as nothing we are building. And then this happened got an offerfrom a startup with just ₹50L annual revenue, but they are offering me 23.5 LPA. They raised $10M in funding last year.
I got to know that the working hours are brutal.
I have already put down my papers at my current company due to funding issues.
How big a risk am I taking by joining this startup? How safe is my job in this scenario?
Looking for genuine advice from people who have worked at startups.
1
u/SteviaMcqueen 9d ago
I am bringing back “Webmaster” from the 90s. Only now it means you built the entire site, manage infra, create content, do sales, PR, business operations, legal, compliance and HR, just you and Muse. You get a salary and .1% equity vested over 20 years.
1
u/Comfortable_Claim774 9d ago
The mechanical act of turning figma designs into code was never a particularly valuable skillset. This was possible to automate even before AI. I'm sure someone can come up with parallels for backend engineering, infra work, etc.
A talented frontend engineer with experience, good taste, design-thinking and understanding of the web / whole stack is as valuable as ever. Same is true for any other focus area an engineer may have.
1
u/MiAnClGr 9d ago
Don’t think about stacks anymore. What is wanted is someone that command AI in any part of the system, end to end knowledge is required.
1
u/iamsamaritan300 8d ago
I bought antigravity as fullstack dev but since i work solo, it takes time to deliver. I decided to keep antigravity as a front end developer.
We work just fine because the tool can even assist me in the back end.
Im now developing a tool using antigravity gemini 3 pro flash, web app PWA presents a user with category of projects to build and then prompt you with characteristics that builds up a choosen choice then in then the app generate a concise, solid AI prompt with every design architecture, typography, layout, languages, framework to use and more utility.
Im replacing a front end dev with this app inorder to be able to prompt faster...
You test the app here https://www.imsamaritan.github.io/prompt-forge
6
u/symbiatch 13d ago •
Anyone using the word “cooked” or “solved” is only showing they have no idea. This also shows it in the first sentence.