> Ms. Ellis, who left the company in 2014, says that almost all of the female software engineers at Google worked in front-end jobs while men worked in back-end roles.
That seems both highly dubious and easy to verify.
Anecdotally, I spent a couple of months this summer going through team selection at Google NYC, with a specific request for back-end, low-level, preferably C++ roles (app security, build systems, etc.). I didn't meet or talk to a single woman through the entire process, with the exception of reception, another candidate, and someone who was covering for my recruiter when he was on vacation. I asked every manager I talked to about diversity on their team, and they all gave wishy-washy answers (at best; one told me that women just weren't interested in his team's work). If I'm remembering right, of the teams that I could have accepted an offer from, exactly one had exactly one woman.
This wasn't the only reason that I ultimately turned down the Google offer (and spent so long in team selection after passing the interview), but it was certainly one of them.
There are some back-end teams at Google that have lots of women; Chrome security comes to mind (I don't know if that's "back-end" in the common sense of the term, but it was the sort of team I was interested in). But I don't find it particularly dubious that these are the exception and not the rule.
Keep in mind that because of their scale, jobs that would be considered full stack or back end at other companies are probably considered front end at Google.
You're half right. Google doesn't hire purely frontend engineers. They have a job listing for them, but once inside everyone gets the same title: Software Engineer.
At Google, the "frontend" work also usually includes the server which serves the frontend code - this means engineers need to be not only capable at UI development, but also be familiar with the Java systems that exist at Google.
From this perspective, frontend at Google is indeed similar to a full stack role at most startups running on AWS or GCP. Backend at Google is more like working on AWS itself.
At a two-person startup, the front end developer is the one doing Angular or React, and the back end developer is the one doing Django or Rails.
At a mid-sized startup, the front end developers are probably also responsible for Django / Rails, and the back end developers are responsible for things like managing the Hadoop cluster and the machine learning components.
And at a large company, anything built with existing libraries might be considered front end, whereas back end might be creating a new database or whatever. I don't claim to know how Google works, but as companies get bigger the back end tends to go further back, and so the 'front end' encompasses more also.
I haven't worked at Google, but I have worked at a very large tech company, and this isn't accurate.
They still hire frontend devs. Those frontend devs still do front-end JS with libraries. Some of them work on in-house libraries, but their focus is still narrow. Same for backend - they use the industry standard term to mean the industry standard.
However, the differentiation of teams/departments is much higher. To take on your argument directly, a project to create a new database would have software engineers but be on an infrastructure team. They don't call themselves backend engineers or recruit backend engineers, they call themselves software engineers and recruit people with skills writing system software.
Well, they sort of do, because those terms don't map so cleanly when you begin spreading into a multi-tiered architecture.
You could easily end up with 'server side' work, which exists solely to augment or support a UI, and is not part of the 'core' business applications/services.
This wasn't the only reason that I ultimately turned down the Google offer (and spent so long in team selection after passing the interview), but it was certainly one of them.
There are some back-end teams at Google that have lots of women; Chrome security comes to mind (I don't know if that's "back-end" in the common sense of the term, but it was the sort of team I was interested in). But I don't find it particularly dubious that these are the exception and not the rule.