throwawaybcknd

What am I doing wrong?

I got some very helpful answer to this. The most important one was probably "Just ask the other people there how things get assigned." (And independent of front- or back-end engineering, while reading what everyone had to say, I realized I should figure out how go back to smaller companies; I am usually happier putting out fires with a small group of people.)

I appreciate it, HN. Thanks!

Someone has to write the compilers.

...In their spare time, as an open-source project, something to keep their mind alive after a day of doing JavaScript on the front-end.

Maybe at Google you can get away with

The recent example was a large, international company. I mentioned this in the post.

Your job is to do _the thing_

Like I said in the post, I do what I get paid to do, and the idea is to figure out how to avoid a place where "the thing" is inappropriate. I have an easier time at startups: I'd rather spend 12 hours a day doing something that matches my talent and interests than spend 8 hours a day saying "Yeah, the button is...I don't know why it is where it is. It looked fine to me before, I don't wanna spend two days on this."

You haven't described the positions you interview for,

If the JD says "JavaScript" or "CSS", I politely decline.

Note that you may not realize they are similar positions, or what it is that they have in common and makes it "wrong".

I can't discount the possibility.

Lastly and most simply, just ask employees there what they are working on

You are the second person to point this out, and I feel like it should have been obvious to me that this is the easiest way to tell. I appreciate it.

I know "some front end". Some things I have picked up like I always knew them, some things required study, some things I'm not going to be good at, and at this point, I'm old enough to know the difference.

Yeah, in that situation, it's better to get out as quickly as possible. I want to avoid getting into that situation, though.

I'm hearing "I only do frontend badly and under protest". That's complicated, "I don't do frontend" is simple

This makes sense.

there's the philosophy that good engineers can apply learnings from one domain to another, and therefore a senior is a fungible resource.

I see that a lot. I mean, JavaScript isn't hard to pick up, but the front-end is not an operating environment that resembles anything else I have ever seen.

Personally, I'm in the former camp- true full-stack is a unicorn,

I think that's the case, too. iOS or desktop applications, I've played with those, I've done games on tiny hardware, those feel like I'm using the same part of the brain the rest of the computer science lives in, but I don't think it's possible to have a thorough understanding of the browser environment and be equally good with anything else.

I would have thought it is much harder to find a back-end specialist these days.

It would seem that way.

Are you not working in a team?

Unless I am doing a contract job, I'm always on a team.

why the strong resistance to frontend work?

I am bad at it. So they get an under-performing employee with low morale and I get complaints about my work.

It can be helpful for a career if you don't have to frequently tell people "I can't do that", vs, "it's not my strong suit but I can pitch in"

I usually do the latter, but then in December I thought I'd better make sure, reasoning that things go better the clearer I am ahead of time. That was the first time I tried saying, "Seriously, I can't do that kind of work." This time I got nothing but that kind of work.

Cynical but kind of accurate.

One of those guys that gets invited to unwind a particular clusterfuck, gets paid $500/hour and quickly moves on to the next gig.

This is a "plays golf with the CTO" rate; I spent some time consulting because I thought that would mean more flexibility, and it's feast or famine, because of what you said about headcount, which applies all the way down until it's companies funded out of pocket. It took me years of consulting to figure that out: headcount is a costly liability at most businesses, but at a VC-funded startup, if they are trying to spend their competitors into the ground, frugality is discouraged.

Specialising is only possible in larger companies (more than 500 employees).

I think it depends on the company. You get niches at 10 employees.

A smaller company might want to hire a backend expert, but who might have to jump into front-end for short periods - sort of an 80-20 split.

Yeah, like I mentioned, I don't mind that. At one company, I ported our network daemon to Windows XP.

I have encountered the same problem but as a FE engineer who doesn’t do backend. (we should hang out)

Maybe we should. I know a good ops guy, we've got a minimum viable tech team.

My suggestion would be to look for info early on in the vetting process for stuff like how titles work there and how teams are organized.

That's a good idea. I usually rely on the hiring manager's job about some parts of the work, but then ask the team about other parts; I should probably move this to the "other parts".

several times in the past few years?

Several times in the past fifteen years, but it was that I got fired or quit.

Do they tell you its because you can't do frontend or is it for performance issues?

The times it was involuntary, it was because I got moved to doing front-end stuff, my performance tanked, I told my manager or whoever was relevant, and sometimes I hear "Just bear with it a minute" and sometimes I hear things like I described above. This was the first time I tried saying anything about it during the interview.

I feel like there's some key information missing here.

I don't get it either, so at least there's that sanity check: I don't get what's going on because it doesn't make sense as presented. That was what the questions were: I'm certain there is something I'm missing, I tend to be socially oblivious sometimes. I do not get it.