Engineering video
9:39 · 1 August 2025
In the speaker’s explanation, analysis of open tech roles shows significantly fewer pure front-end engineering positions compared to backend and full stack, with most available front-end roles requiring senior levels or overlapping full stack responsibilities.
Hear it at 0:00 →In the speaker’s explanation, front-end positions are decreasing due to over-accessibility causing high competition, past hyper-specialization, the shift of front-end tech into full-stack paradigms like server-side rendering, and AI coding models performing better on popular languages like JavaScript and React.
Hear it at 2:32 →In the speaker’s explanation, developers need to change their mindset from being restricted to front-end tasks to viewing themselves as software engineers specializing in client-side applications while transferring known concepts like state management to backend paradigms.
Hear it at 5:07 →In the speaker’s explanation, engineers should start close to their comfort zone at the data layer (learning REST APIs and GraphQL) before moving outward to backend fundamentals like HTTP, web security, and design patterns like MVC and class design.
Hear it at 5:54 →In the speaker’s explanation, delivering full value requires getting hands-on with deployment, understanding Docker, configuring cloud infrastructure mentally without over-certifying, and managing monitoring, rollbacks, and bug resolution across the stack.
Hear it at 7:21 →I was on two up with BDON checking the number of open tech jobs and as you can see here the number of openings it's recovering steadily especially compared to 2024 right but what's even more interesting you go to engineering software engineering openings you see there are about 60,000 openings now this is worldwide and we said hey let's let's investigate a bit right uh let's open this up what was very surprising is if you look at backend position open positions we have about 33,000 out of 60,000, right? If you look at full sec, we have about 29K. I guess some of those are they overlap each other, but that's
not the point. The point is you find front end down here with 2,821 open positions, which is 10 times less than backend or full stack positions, which actually confirms a trend that we've seen with our own students, which is, hey, it's front end engineering dying or that already? Why is this happening? And most importantly, what can you do about it? as a front-end engineer looking to to stay relevant in today's market. Let's start with the beginning. If you don't know us, my name is Drago and together with my brother Bogdon here in the call as well, we co-ounded the senior dev.com where we helped JavaScript engineers all over the
world level up to senior and beyond. So, let's first understand what's happening in the front end. It's front-end dev really dying. So what you can already observe especially if you're a front-end developer looking for a position right now or you're checking the market is that there are fewer front-end jobs and more people more front-end engineers competition is insane. What's more, even if some jobs are labeled as front end, they are actually asking for full stack skills. And finally, most of them, most of the front end jobs, if you go to LinkedIn or indeed.com, you'll see that a lot of them are asking for senior lead
or staff level, right? So mid-level jobs in junior jobs in the front end are basically almost gone. And here is a good example of a front- end engineer job in San Francisco. And they're actually asking for GraphQL, posgress, OMS, node, and express internal APIs. actually they're overlapping the full stack skill set quite a lot. Another example, senior front engineer, they want react and typescript but actually it's about designing and maintaining infrastructure for full stack solutions which is definitely a full stack position with AWS CDK and terraform architect CI/CD pipelines and uh diagnose troubleshoot and resolve
performance issues error locks you know across the whole production system. Definitely full stack responsibility in a position that's marketed as a front-end position. So why is this happening? Why are pure front-end positions going away? Well, first of all, front end was where most people started and I would estimate about 80% of the any boot camp syllabus was actually front end. Front end was very accessible. Bton started in the front end. I started in front end. It's where most self-taught engineers actually started. So as a consequence, you had you can imagine you have a lot of people in the market with front-end skills. On
top of that, front end was victim of hyper specialization which you had these developers who were hired by big companies in the past. You know, they spent 6 months working on a simple button definitely overinvested. Uh with the age of efficiency where companies are looking to be more lean and more profitable. Of course, those developers those over specialized hyper specialized developers were the first ones to get laid off and not get rehired. Another factor is that front-end tech slowly moved into the full stack, right? We, you know, things like SSR, serverside rendering came up, then we had Nex.js,
then we had more and more infrastructure topics that were involved uh with the front end, meaning that front end engineers little by little had to know more and more back end, right? And finally, AI works better in the front end. And here Bdon, you worked a lot with AI. Can you tell us why why is that AI works better in the front end? >> So one of the best data we have in software engineering productivity comes from Stanford and what they found by studying private repositories in the enterprise which is where actual work gets done. We're not looking at open source projects where people just commit
a lot of work. I have a lot of git repos for example with JavaScript. It doesn't mean I'm productive there. It's just people push a lot of code to their to their repos. uh but if you look at the actual work getting done they found out that the lower the task complexity and the more popular the language the more abundant data and model tuning you have so coding models work better with the most popular languages and frameworks and if we look at the open-source uh code that those models were trained on a lot of it was JavaScript and specifically ReactJS because this was uh the most popular framework for the last
10 years since 2015 when it came out and so it's a lot easier to generate component code for example with AI than it is to generate Haskell code for some backend endpoint or even things like Java do not have that much data uh because again those models were trained on public code and a lot of Java code that's written in enterprise is not public now the most important question you're probably asking yourself okay what can you do about it as a front-end engineer and there's a bunch of things you can do about Let's start with number one. First, you need a mindset change, right? And you need to change your
mindset from the front-end engineer to you being a software engineer that's specialized in client side applications. Exactly. So, you need to look at all your knowledge in the front end and see how that applies to the back end. A very easy example is state. A lot of people think state it's something that React invented or JavaScript frameworks have, but we do have state in the back end too. We just manage it differently.
Actually the database it's a manifestation of state in a program. Whatever you have in memory when you execute an endpoint that's also state. You need to take a look at all your knowledge and what you'll realize is okay what can actually transfer to the back end. And talking about that you got to learn full stack skills and I bet we're not the first ones telling you this but let's get a bit more specific.
So you can start with the foundations you know basic rest API and graph knowledge right moving towards from the front end towards the data layer. Then a good idea and what we train all the students that we work with whether they are back end or front end is having a strong understanding of the fundamentals and the fundamentals in the back end are slightly different than the front end things like HTTP o web security basics and finally move on towards a backend design patterns. uh you can start with the basics you know MVC then understand a bit of RMS and finally class design very core concept to the back end that
we don't touch a lot in the front end exactly so you want to start as close as possible to the front end because that's your confidence area and slowly move towards the back end that's why you always start as you mentioned to with the data layer and then you slowly get more confident and you go deeper all the way to the database layer but then go in and start learning Kubernetes from day one or People go in and they look at load balancers. That's just too far away from what you've been working on. So it will be very hard. It will be a new domain. And even if you learn that conceptually, it's very hard for you to
relate it to any actual work. So when you go to interviews, you won't be able to really stand behind it. That's why you want to start as close to the front end as possible and extend that and move that boundary of your knowledge towards more and more the back end. And finally folks, you have to get your hands dirty with CI/CD and that means going a bit beyond deploying to Netlifi. Uh what we mean is learn deployment front end and back end. Always think about how how can I deploy this piece of software that I'm working on and then having a good knowledge of Docker and some cloud provider. Most people use AWS or Azure.
GCP is not that common. Uh just don't get too obsessed about the specific provider, but focus more on the mental models behind it. Again, your mindset should be you get hired on value delivered. And so what do you need to deliver value? Well, let's say you build that front-end feature. It usually has a bit of backend work coupled with it. And then we need to get it live. And once it's live, we need to operate it. So we need a bit of monitoring. You know, understanding how to find production bugs. Can you roll back your own deployments? Can you deploy a hot fix in production? That's usually, you know, a
bit of front end and a bit of back end. They go in and be like, "Oh, I need an AWS certification." and go study for 6 months. That will probably not help you. It will involve a lot of memorizing concepts you don't work with. Focus on getting things done, getting things to production. Uh finally, folks, one thing I would add is you are not tossing away your front-end knowledge. Uh you are not disappearing from the job market. You're just expanding your skill set as a software engineer. Even as a front-end dev, you were doing this all the time.
But in the past, it was with the next shiny uh full stack front-end framework. And now it's all about uh going full stack. You will use whatever you learn in the front end. You will reuse it in the back end. You're just trying to adapt to the current job market and do a bit more than what you used to. Finally, uh if you're looking to understand what skills you are missing, especially if you want to move from the front end towards the back end, this free technical assessment that B and I put together will give you a great overview of what your gaps are all across the stack. And of course folks, if you're a
JavaScript developer and you are looking to get to senior and of course full stack, we can get you there with our mentorship program or you don't pay. There's a free training in the comments that will show you exactly how we do that. And if you want to find out if this can also work for you, then I invite you to book a chat with me or Bogdan and see if you would be a fit for that. Thank you, Bdon. And we will see you folks in the next
