| > A senior engineer that has always worked in the backend won't be able to be up to speed with a complex frontend app quickly and be as effective as a senior frontend. And I strongly disagree with you, and I have a real life example to disprove it (i know, a single data point is just anecdata, but still). Our team was doing mostly web front-end (your typical TS+React+Webpack+etc., you get the idea), and we got an internal transfer about 1.5 years ago. Senior engineer, not a "rockstar coder" by any means. He doesn't spend his free time working on tons of side projects, he has other hobbies that aren't related to coding. Just a really solid engineer all around. Here is the catch: his sole experience for the past 8-10 years until that point was writing OS-level C++ code. Exactly zero experience with anything web or front-end related. In a month, he was already decently productive and pushing significant functionality-related PRs on regular. 3 months in at most, he was fully productive and indistinguishable from anyone else on the team, except he also had back-end skills that were better than those of at least half of the team. And no, we weren't building a simple CRUD app (not that there is anything wrong with that), it was a pretty complex tool that worked and integrated across a bunch of different Office suite products. Sidenote: Thought to mention that part about "other hobbies not related to coding" to make a point that he didn't just compensate for his lack of existing front-end knowledge by throwing some ungodly number of hours of his own free time at it to ramp up. The problem is that most people cannot afford throwing that many hours of their "free" time considering other life commitments. And no, there is nothing wrong with throwing many hours of free time to bruteforce a skill, that doesn't take away from the person's ability in it imo. But if the engineer I am talking about had done that, then my point wouldn't have generalized well. |