So I was thinking if there would be a time when the world wouldn't need front-end engineers and it would be better to be a full-stack software engineer to be more flexible in the future.
Uh.. I was full stack engineer and I would rather stay mostly backend than touch front end.<p>It's just wild wild west when I was still a full stack dev.<p>There was these clientside rendering framework emberjs, angular, knockoutjs, etc...<p>What the hell man, now the flavor is fluxjs and reactjs or whatever.<p>This is on top of html and css being more of an art then a science. Then came along the grid system to fix most of the warts but cross browser compatibility, etc...<p>I don't believe front end engineer is going away because there is just so much stuff in front end and back end to be for one person. You can be a fullstack but you can't be a master of all of it unless you got no life, no family, etc..
I really hope for a standardized universal UI to emerge, maybe something like the futuristic screens in Deus Ex games. There just needs to be something like a hypermedia-api on a server, some semantic content markup, and all consumers (browsers, terminals, ...) handle everything else.<p>As a developer I just want to provide an data/api endpoint and say somehow "this is an universal UI app".<p>No, Basic HTML isnt enough, and wiring together data into presentable forms over and over again isnt particular fun or exciting after a while. Except you learn a new frontend framework for every project... :)
If you're talking about just constructing new JS views, creating templates, and styling them, yes I think that will be relegated a WYSIWYG editor for a designer to weld.<p>I know people said this was going to happen when Dreamweaver came out, but the languages were still clunky. CSS had barely come out and layouts were done by nesting tables within tables. The machine-created code was shit <i>and</i> browsers were wildly inconsistent. Now we have decent browser consistency between Firefox/Chrome/Safari, CSS grids are arriving, and React component web views are gaining more traction. So in 5-10 years, why can't we have an editor that does all this for you?<p>Yes, there will always be a need for custom interfaces. So a small amount of front-end folks will remain hand-crafting artisan components (and perhaps selling them on a Wordpress-like market place), while other people will either need to move into design/UX roles, or further down the stack.
Depends what you mean by front-end engineer. If you are interested in front-end work I would focus on brushing up on your UX and design skill. I have no particular need for someone who only knows how to implement a front end based on an exact spec, I would however love to have a developer on my team who can actually both come up with and implement a good looking, easy to use front end.
I don't think so. There would always be a need for specialists.<p>Maybe full-stack engineers would have an easier time finding employment(as requiters keep on piling up those needs-to-know requirements), but some shops will always value someone who's shit-hot at one specific thing in particular, as opposed to merely competent at a lot.
There is still a demand for front end devs since there are so many frameworks that are coming out and so many to maintain. I would still go for full stack roles as it would give you better job security. Plus, it would gives you a better view of how the system works.
Since we're heading towards a AI-driven applications, perhaps front-end has plateaued. However, would full-stack still be so relevant if front end is no-longer a concern?