I've switched between frontend and backend four times this year and I'm nowhere on either
Every time something gets hard I decide the other side is where I actually belong. Lost a day to a CSS layout, so clearly I'm a backend person. Then a Postgres query plan made no sense to me and suddenly React looked friendly again.
Four rounds of that and what I have is a pile of finished tutorials and nothing I'd show anyone.
The honest read is I'm not choosing between two interests. I'm leaving whichever one stopped being fun that week.
Did anyone actually pick, and how? I don't think I need the "just do fullstack" answer. I think I need the "commit to one for six months even when it sucks" answer, from someone who's actually done it.
3 comments
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AnonymousAnon On the point above about every specialisation having the same wall — true up to a point, but the walls aren't quite the same shape. Frontend's hard bits tend to show up early and in public. Backend's show up later and at 2am.
Same height, agreed. But if you already know you'd rather be defeated in front of people than woken up by a pager, that's a legitimate tiebreaker when nothing else is separating them.
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AnonymousAnon Worth noticing that the switch always comes straight after something hard. That's not information about frontend or backend, that's information about the wall. Every specialisation has one and they're all about the same height. Six weeks into the other side you'll meet it again wearing a different hat.
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AnonymousAnon You asked for the six-months answer so here's mine. I picked backend more or less arbitrarily, coin-flip level, and the rule was that I couldn't reconsider until I'd shipped three things other people actually used.
The arbitrary part is fine. Almost nobody's first pick was objectively correct, they just got far enough in that it became theirs.