
Ask HN: How to escape front end development? - Matachines
I&#x27;m getting bored and frustrated by FE jobs and want a &quot;section of programming&quot; change. There are areas I&#x27;m interested in like distributed systems but since FE and by extension JS are the only things I know well it&#x27;s a) hard for me to know what to do and b) worrying that my lack of experience will make it impossible to get a job in other areas.<p>I have ~5 years as a FE dev. Has anyone successfully escaped it?
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iends
Have you looked at Node.js backend jobs? Maybe try and take a full stack job
where you do both FE and backend and slowly transition to more backend work?

It worked for me. FE JS -> Fullstack JS -> Backend Node.js.

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shakna
I started similar:

FE JS -> Fullstack JS -> Backend Node.js. -> Backend Python/Lua/C -> Desktop
Software -> Embedded Software

It can take time, I was probably 2-4 years in each, required some study, and
some interviews didn't work out for experience reasons, some did because I
could prove I understood the issues at hand.

I'm now firmly in Desktop/Embedded which comes with its own challenges, but
could not be happier about escaping JS and its... Oddness.

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wreath
Did you try to talk to your manager about it? Maybe the company can help you
grow into that role if there is a room for it. Moving from FE to BE looks like
a career change in a way, especially if you only know JavaScript in the front
end. Also, I would suggest you start a side project to play around with
backend technologies and you see for yourself if that's what you _really_ want
to do in the future.

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itamarst
To expand on existing comments, there's two things you need:

1\. Relevant technical skills beyond front-end development.

2\. Relevant _credibility_ in those additional skills with your current or
future employers.

Learning an adjacent technology within your current organization is therefore
the easiest way to do this (see
[https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/04/27/which-
technology/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/04/27/which-technology/)).
Backend Node.js if you can manage it would be easiest, but backend anything
will do.

And yeah, talking to a manager about a change is a good way to learn something
new while being paid to do so.

But there are other ways, e.g. years ago I transitioned out web development
and into distributed systems by becoming a contributor to an open source
networking framework.

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kctess5
I am still in college (masters student) but have done a good bit of web dev
both as a freelancer and at internships. I discovered after a while that it is
not what I want to do long term, and have since tried to move away from front
end.

I think the answer largely lies in where you have the interest and willingness
to learn new tech. Moving to full stack would probably be an easy transition,
as knowing both front and back end is very marketable, and there's even stacks
which require minimal retooling (read: node.js). Alternatively, there's things
like ML/AI, vision, control, embedded systems, crypto, and quite a few other
sub disciplines which you might find more interesting, at the cost of a
steeper learning curve. MIT has quite a large number of courses online (even
in video form) with OCW/edx, and there are certainly quite a few other
resources available for learning if you have the time/interest/energy. Picking
up new languages is probably a good place to start, and it becomes very easy
once you've written a few thousand lines in a couple different languages since
there's so much conceptual overlap.

In terms of experience/resume items in order to get hired in a different
specialization, I think that small toy/fun projects that display knowledge in
a given subject matter are very good in terms of marketing yourself. Of
course, this route takes a fair amount of time, but can be very rewarding and
interesting if you pick projects that align with what you find cool. What you
choose to do doesn't even have to be novel/groundbreaking to be very
rewarding. It's also imo easier to learn things if it's in the context of
needing solutions to practical problems. If you do go this route, I highly
recommend making a small website that showcases what you have done. I did
this, and have heard first hand from several managers that it was a primary
factor in me getting an offer. I've even bombed interviews but still gotten an
offer because of my website.

On the bright side, I do think that front end is a very useful skill in
general - I use my web dev skills to display my other work and occasionally to
pay the bills. If you do decide to pick up a different specialty, your time
thus far will not have been wasted.

Good luck!!

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wayn3
Get good at math.

