Backend or Frontend career to get into higher levels.
I was always curios on how do people get into l5, l6 or higher levels in FANG companies and after reading some of their interview experiences and stuff, I always noticed that you need to have good backend with good distributed design experience. My questions follows, is it better to get into backend roles to have a better career in the future? I have worker full stack around 5 years, and at this point I was thinking if I should get into backend roles in the future. What do you think about this.
I think frontend is very specific, but backend is very broad. People take backend to mean all SWE work besides front end. This includes writing app services obviously but can also include infra tools, cloud services, data pipelines/jobs, specific core logics (e.g. entire computation engine for a BI tool probably written in C++ or something). At a certain level you’ll start cross cutting these things and being a UI/react expert won’t be enough.
I'm not very knowledgeable about front end, and I'm kinda curious. What does L6+ impact/difficulty/complexity mean in front end world? Like just give me a hint of the flavor of that work. (Not doubting it's real it's just I don't have any sense for what gets really hard about frontend.)
In my idea, That would be structure design of a complicate web application. It’s pretty like level by level components design, global state management. Focus on business logic area.
At Google I've seen L7+ FE get there by building something framework level with broad impact/adoption among several teams/orgs. Like architecting angular or driving a new web standard. Definitely won't get past L5/L6 working on a single webapp, except maybe Gmail scale.
Be really good at your domain to get to L5 / L6. But in general L7+ will have more opportunities for backend.