I’m sensing this weird bully/contempt chain in the software engineering industry: ML > backend > frontend The ML guys can proudly say “I know nothing about databases or API”, while the backend guys say “I know shit about javascript ha ha”. Is it just my illusion or do you feel the same?
I’m full stack but tbh when I hear someone say “I know nothing about APIs or web architecture and I’ve never used HTML or CSS in my life” I don’t really find that impressive... quite the opposite... if you have never spent the time to learn how the internet works, it kind of makes me think that you must not know too much about software in general.
I’m a backend engineer, but I respect Frontend engineers. I don’t have the patience for nor understanding of CSS to do jackshit. Anyone who is a decently competent frontend engineer has my respect, I hate that shit
I think it's related to salaries more than anything else
But, full stack = frontend = backend in terms of salary at FAANG. ML can be more but honestly the company matters more than the role... L5 front-end SWE at F/G makes more than L5 equivalent machine learning engineer at most companies.
Can't speak for G but most E7+ are back end related engineers rather than full stack or front end. So i believe that would be the reason
Research scientist > research engineer > machine learning engineer > software engineer (ML) > software engineer > front end
I agree until you got to the last part there. Front-end is only a joke to people who have never professionally done it. Learning how to create backend API endpoints was much easier for me than learning how to use Angular and React at Google & Facebook.
Yeah you are right. Front end/mobile engineering is probably a different hierarchy all together
At google salaries are same across levels. Inital offer depends on conpeting offers, ml guys have better competing offers hence they get paid more. Refreshers and bonus indep of speciality. At google especially its really tough to rise up as an ml engineer as we have real superstars waiting to design models, folks who wrote the book you studied, google because of initial culture rewards infra engineers the most to rise up.
The people who think frontend is only CSS are the problem for creating such a chain and are literally stupid. Check out a modern frontend app in any of the famous libraries/frameworks like React, Anuglar etc, the code is equally complex and CSS is a really small part of it. Writing good JS isn’t as easy. This is the reason I enjoy being a full stack. Also, tbh, 95% of backend engineers are only writing API endpoints and using already established tech a.k.a gluing together APIs to achieve that. So there’s literally no point in feeling good about yourself as a backend engineer unless you’re truly working on “building” tech like Kafka or some AWS product used by Fortune companies.
Frontend is also about writing various APIs. The code is complex because Javascript is badly designed and you need all those libraries like Transpiler, Typescript, Linting, etc to make things less fragile. These aren't good problems to solve.
@centrify So you mean Java is badly design because it complies down to byte code and has a linter lol Modern JavaScript is not longer a badly designed language if you only have the patience to learn.
no it's : front end > research engineer > software engineer (ML) > software engineer >= research scientist > machine learning engineer trust me because I am a random anon post in this forum and so I know everything
I think backend engineers are mostly just gluing together existing techs and doing operation stuff (on-call) unless you're actually designing and developing shit like Apache Solr, Hadoop, etc. And even you're developing say Apache Solr you are most likely a guy that's implementing some algorithm that is invented by researchers. And I would say the same for FE. So IMO they're equal.
Bang on. Have started with device drivers now do FE. I do feel nothing must be under mining. On an average nothing is very original.
So, everyone is just plumber.
Cloud > backend > frontend
Best chain: full stack guy who knows just enough about ML to implement the ML guys shitty model and get the job done