Being a software engineer is tough. You need to know a couple of programming languages and tools right from the get-go. But that won’t cut it. Companies expect you to know whatever particular framework they use. That might be Rails or Django or Laravel or something else. You’ll also need CSS. It’ll take you a lifetime to learn — and you still won’t know why the layout’s breaking — but knowing just enough to get by is feasible.
And then this...
Oh and, turns out we were just getting started.
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth there was a type of professional called a System Administrator. Their whole job was to make sure that your backend was working nicely. They handled infrastructure changes, upgrading the database, system upgrades, keeping the daemon running, restarts, everything. Then came DevOps. Some cash-strapped company somewhere decided that now all of this would be handled by the engineers and everyone agreed. Now you need to learn Docker. Oh, your whole app is just a single statically linked binary and you don’t need Docker? Learn Ansible and I hope you have fun figuring out the options you need to pass to SystemD.
And you’re not even halfway there. Now you gotta learn AWS. You won’t be using the GUI to configure your infrastructure like a peasant so you better learn Terraform or Pulumi or whatever.
Insert Kubernetes here.
Software gets more complicated. All of this complexity is there for a reason. But what happened to specializing? When a house is being built, tons of people are involved: architects, civil engineers, plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, interior designers, roofers, surveyors, pavers, you name it. You don’t expect a single person, or even a whole single company, to be able to do all of those.
I know a lot of frontend engineers that strongly believe this.