[onion2k]

Dev jobs where you do no frontend at all are pretty unusual, especially in startups where everyone does a bit of everything. You're often given some 'easy' fixes that are inevitably frontend before you're let loose on the 'hard' stuff at the back end. As a dev who worked on mostly frontend code for about 25 years it's incredibly annoying. It's probably a large factor in why the web sucks - a lot of devs who don't want to work on frontend apps and who don't really understand what's important in a frontend app are churning out code that isn't fit for the job. More specialism would help immensely.

[nitwit005]

I do not believe backend roles with no exposure to frontend are particularly unusual.

[bogota]

Same. If they want front end help don’t hire the guy who is telling you they don’t do front end. Have to take OP at their word here but if that is true the company just sounds like a place you don’t want to work anyway.

[kelnos]

Yeah, no-frontend jobs have been the majority of my career. I don't know if I'm typical, but I don't think I'm atypical.

[crystal_revenge]

> Dev jobs where you do no frontend at all are pretty unusual,

Maybe for webdev jobs this is true, but there's lots of software out there in the world that is not web development. I don't think I've ever seen ML engineers anywhere near the front-end except in cases where they're personally interested in it.

I do think if you're doing web development being asked to do a front end task, especially as your first ticket since these tend to be quicker fixes, is not too surprising.

But OP might do best to try to avoid web development work altogether. There are quite a variety of data engineering, ML engineering and infrastructure related roles where it would be completely out of the question to be expected to do any front-end.

[bogota]

If you hate front end as much as OP does. I do as well. Just switch to infra/platform engineer. No one ever talks to me about front end unless it’s to deploy the application.

[mnk47]

Any tips on making this move? also, I've seen that a lot of infra jobs are just sysadmin in disguise. How do you deal with this?

[bogota]

I started as a swe at a startup and then just made my job fixing our AWS and deployments going from hand deploys on EC2 to docker containers on some of the first versions of rancher.

After that I was hired at a FANG company and worked on automating data centers and service deployments as well as a ton of other stuff. Now I pretty much just go setup infra teams for people I used to work with who are at various small to medium startups.

So I don’t have a great answer for you but I would say staying away from anything where all they can tell you is “k8s” “terraform” and stuff that boils down to writing yaml or some config language all day. Additionally if you can’t get a good idea of where the company is today in the interview and where they would like to go it’s going to be sys admin stuff. In all my interviews i lay out where we currently are and all the issues that causes and go over where we want to be in a year from now and what things need to be done to get there. At the end you should feel like you fit into some part of that.

It is amazing how many hiring managers can’t give you a coherent picture of that. If all they can say is we need k8s, docker, infra as code and other buzz words without a plan the team is setup to fail.

The other way is just apply for platform eng or sre jobs at FANG and friends which will almost never be sys admin stuff although it can happen sometimes if they are listed for a team that works on the corporate side of the business.

[winrid]

I've never seen this. At all startups I've been at, there were either frontend, backend, or FS people, but the separation and ownership was clear. They wouldn't waste a Java Dev's time assigning them CSS stuff, that's just dumb. There's always little tech debt to start with on backend too.