Good video on front-end career path.
These guys have done some bangers on the nuance around AI for coders. Yes, their titles are click baity, but they have the intelligence, experience, communication skills to produce good content. Three things I want to point out they don’t cover in this video.
First, you can go higher than Staff as a front-end engineer. These vary widely from organization as well as in various industries. The equivalent would be Senior Staff Engineer, Staff+, Distinguished Engineer, or Technical Fellow to name a few. The differences vary too, but the 2 key things are most at that level are handling more than 1 team, and are often doing strategy and influencing technical direction.
Second, their Staff Engineer definition encompasses that Staff+ role; there can be a wide gulf from Staff on up, so their bulleted list that says “influences tech for the entire company” means something different when the company has 300 employees vs. 150,000. The larger the company, the easier it is to specialize, but you’ll also have more steps between a senior dev and Staff, and various rungs on the IC career ladder in between. For example, in big companies, you don’t just build an entire Angular app, and upon promotion, tell a Fortune 500 we’re all using React now. But for 6 teams working on a new initiative? Sure.
I personally know 2 developers at my company who are front-end, and have been promoted to Distinguished Engineer’s. For context, I’m a Tech Lead, and the levels go something like Engineeer -> Senior Engineer -> Principal Engineer -> Tech Lead -> Senior Tech Lead -> Distinguished Engineer -> Senior Distinguished Engineer (I forget what the VP level is). So when people say “You won’t get promoted as a UI dev, just go full-stack”, that could be true at the company(ies) they work at, but that’s not true at all companies. If full-stack isn’t your thing, it is not necessarily a death knell for your career growth.
Finally, you don’t have to stay IC. Many places you’re allowed to change to a management role for a few years, then change back. Additionally, some have many roles in between, like Sales Engineer where you’re doing strategy and influence, but more on a consulting angle. Others do a Developer Experience role on some specialty, like DevOps, and both travel showing how to build CI systems AND do a little Sales Engineering for certain sales calls/client engagements. Sometimes it’s because you want to learn more management/leadership skills. Sometimes you’re bored. The point is, you don’t HAVE to learn server-side Java to level up if you dig building website UI’s.
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