What does a Front End Engineer do?
So you have seen the JDs and promo clips. But what is work really like and what do hiring managers look for when recruiting Front End Engineers, Web Developers, App Developers, etc.
Typical Front End Developer Job Description
We are looking for programmers with a keen eye for design for the position of front end developer. Front end developers are responsible for ensuring the alignment of web design and user experience requirements, optimizing web pages for maximum efficiency, and maintaining brand consistency across all web pages, among other duties.
Front end developers are required to work in teams alongside back end developers, graphic designers, and user experience designers to ensure all elements of web creation are consistent. This requires excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
(check out Betterteam for the full sample JD, or just check out your favourite job site)
What do I look for when hiring front end engineers
Firstly, don’t be intimidated by the list below. It’s very rare for an entry level engineer to be able to domonstrate everything I talk about here. My purpose in sharing this with you is to get you to think about your own development, how to communicate about yourself and what experiences you prioritise in seeking out as try to land the role your aiming for. The more of these you can demonstrate the more “Yes - let’s hire them now!” type feedback will go to HR and hence help you land that job!
I am looking for #1 - #5 first as that is what will help me understand how you’d fit into the team. Once I understand your experiences, views and how you think about them, it’s only then I’ll try and understand your level of competence with a technology.
Eye for design, usability and accessibility (this last one is growing in importance across all types of companies) - use Dribble, Behance and other similar places online to get up to speed on various emerging and mature trends.
Good understanding of layout configurations - you’ll need to think of the experience across desktop, mobile tablet, different screen sizes. Know your Bootstrap grids? Bonus points, if you can contribute and co-design with a UX designer. You can use something like Figma to experiment with different layout configs on a side project to learn.
Super strong communication and act as a bridge between tech and non tech roles - you’ll often be working with both non techies and tech teams alike in your day to day job (e.g. turn tech requirements, such as screens always loading in 0.5 sec, to non tech requirements, such as thinking about screen transitions or widget feedback loops, loading flows and animations; or take a high level UI concept in Figma and share missing exception flows or issues with the design). The front end is the glue that people most often interact with and most software development project start with defining the concept design for the front end first.
Discipline and time-management - Given that the front end engineer role regualarly works with non technical and technical team members alike, you often can be pulled in a couple of different directions. One part of the day you might be fixing 2-3 production issues (i.e. fix bugs with existing UI components), then heading into a brainstorming session for a new feature (e.g. help break down the UI into smaller components) being rolled out in the next month, followed by new feature development on your current sprint (e.g. write new components from scratch, or work with backend engineers to scope and iterate on the API designs).
Bonus points: Connection to the user base - being in tech gives you a unique perspective on how exactly a service is delivered to a end customer (or user). You can read all the industry reports, look at internal process and requirements doc - however, nothing beats seeing first hand how the software you build is used by the end customer with the feedback that you have access to in the logs files and analytics collected. Building something that you would personally use (or have a deep, direction connection to the end user) is great way to speed up the learning cycles that are needed in the fast changing world right now to maintain a front end.
Front End Technical skills - I am trying to understand how broad and deep is your knowledge of the tech stack that we use in the company. There is no right or wrong answers here and no single person can know everything about a tech topic - including the interviewer. Share your experiences, knowledge and insights. Be respectful and assertive if there is a debate. Real work on projects often have a lot of trade-offs that need to be made and this is where technology can become more of an art vs. a science. So being able to debate and work out a way forward with others is a critical skill that’s needed and results in much better solutions.
Bonus Points: Cloud and Tech-Glue Skill - Front ends need to live somewhere beyond your local laptop. When you start off often the tech lead or another team will take care of this for you. But be curious, learn about how GitHub, Git actions, CI/CD and Cloud works. Learn about serverless front ends. It’s another way you can be a better engineer and show that not only you qualify for the current grade, but perhaps, on the path to being the next tech lead for the team!
What are the trends and skills to think about if your upskilling
Here is the beast of a roadmap for Front End Engineers as of July 2021. Start reading this from the green circle and move in any direction from there. And remember, no single person will know everything here - but learning related skills is important. That’s the value and trick to using a roadmap like this.
If your new to front end engineering, pick one of the core frameworks like React, Angular or Vue and build from there. If your experienced, think about how frameworks help achieve a business objective thats important in your industry (e.g. in ecommerce and retail, SEO is important, so maybe learning nextJS could be useful.
Keep up to date on maturing and emerging UX trends. You can read some here or here
If this is super intimidating, don’t be. Happy to have a chat individually with you to help coach you on some next steps. And there is no cost for this - it’s free :-)
You can book a slot with me here: https://calendly.com/kiritkundu/30min
I set out to write this newsletter to help entry level people break into tech or their first IT role. Since then, I have met a number of you - from locals to international students, people who are early in their career but looking to move roles or companies and non technical people looking to move into tech. I have been fortunate to have had the guidance early on in my career, and now this is a bit of giveback to the community.