In the modern industrial system, any work is broken down into an assembly line, but in today’s Internet industry, there are six or seven steps from users knowing what they want to actually make it.
As a person who likes to write code, there are few choices, only “back-end engineer” and “front-end engineer”. For a long time in the past, I basically stayed in the back-end field, did a lot of back-end related development, and gained more knowledge of the back-end aspect.
In the New Year of 2019, I will try to turn myself into a front-end engineer. Here’s the logic behind my choice.
What exactly determines the value of an employee?
The closer it is to the customer, the more value it has.
When it comes to choosing a career, two topics are unavoidable: the needs of the company and the value of its employees. Generally speaking, we believe that the value of an employee is determined by the value he brings to the enterprise.
That’s true. So how do employees add value to an organization?
Employees can help companies create better products, but is that value?
A better product is not value in itself, but the users and customers it brings are the real value.
The employees themselves do not make the company profitable. On the contrary, the company has to pay the employees. The customer pays the fee to the company and helps the company make a profit.
From this point of view, the closer the customer is, the more value can be generated. This is why we often see that in an enterprise, sales are the ones who make the most money, because they are the closest to the customer and can bring real value to the enterprise.
The pitfalls behind technology
Technology itself is a screw. If we only study technology, it is just a screw and becomes a coarser one.
Is it bad to focus on technology itself? Of course not, as a developer, the pursuit of technical excellence is an obligation. But, from a business perspective, focusing on the technology itself means that you are constantly less valuable.
No matter how good the technology is, it is possible to find a replacement. The difference is simply the willingness to spend that much money. The depth of business understanding is something that no one else can easily replace. There are generations of talented people who have been at the top for hundreds of years, and technology iterations are very fast. There are always new people who are better at technology than you.
Why front-end and not back-end
The front end today is closer to the business itself and more valuable
With the highly pipelined modern software products, the separation of the front and back ends, RESTFul API and GraphQL advocated by us make the work of the back end easier and easier. We can spend more energy on the exploration of technical depth and study deeper optimization problems without spending more thoughts on business logic.
Similarly, the front end has to take over the development of business processes, and the workload is greatly increased. Although a variety of component libraries help the front end optimize the layout and interface, the complexity of the business process itself is not reduced by the introduction of component libraries.
In this model, the front end takes over the work of the back end, which no longer needs to understand the business logic and pays more attention to the content of the technology itself. The distance from the business makes the back end have less and less say.
The effortless front end
Front-end engineers themselves are responsible for what the customer sees, giving them more career options than back-end engineers.
They understand the user interaction experience and can move from development to user research
They understand user usage and can move from development to sales
They understand the user path and can make the transition from development to product manager
The latter, because of their expertise in technology, simply switch from one skill to another.