Ask HN: Where are all the senior front end engineers?

1. Job descriptions and interviews now are skewed towards "full-stack" or backend. Most interviews are lacking or outdated due to the fast and volatile nature of FE.

2. Literally no career progression if you're specialised in FE. Most BE or "full-stack" devs will be given a chance to become principal engineers, tech leads, engineering managers, CTOs, etc. I've seen folks with "FE Team Lead" titles but never goes beyond that.

3. FE is a subconsciously looked-down field. Neither a designer nor an engineer. Product/design team won't involve you in meetings (but will treat you like a code monkey). BE/"full-stack"/API engineers will think your job is easy and keep throwing business logic stuff to FE.

Additionally, it could be your job posting not being enticing enough to get hits. I'm a senior FE dev and I saw some pretty bad job postings (hostile programming assessments, unpaid take home assignments, a circus of interviewing rounds). If you don't have your salary listed, that could be the issue too.

I can't speak for everyone here, but I'll take 2nd or 3rd best in compensation if the interviewing process isn't a 3-ring circus. ie, I will actively drop out to protect my time from bad interview pipelines.

My last two gigs were less than 2 hours of total conversation before a contract got signed, as an anecdote. Hell, I had one that was a 23 minute phonecall (it was awesome!). Some people just know how to hire someone after they look at a good LinkedIn or GitHub profile.

Just my 2 cents. As a selfish plug, you could talk to freelancers who have the expertise you need so stuff gets done in the meantime. It's not ideal, but at least you'd have the help...

I've been banging my head for the past few weeks trying to get our management team to understand off shoring is by no means an easy solution any more. We've traditionally hired off shore with good success, and management thinks it's still easy. However, our recruiters have been fairly quiet these past few months, and the candidates that we're getting are a lot less experienced than what we want. You absolutely cannot just waltz into a developing country with a US job posting and expect candidates lining up. Everyone did that, and now we're in a situation where the competition is insane. Off shore costs have skyrocketed, and, addressing your second point, you have to have interesting work for them.

Also if you aren't posting a salary you might be losing people who gloss over the posting since FE isn't always respected/paid well. I think that factors into my gravitating to full stack work, I absolutely love FE work but finding a company that will let me do that and pays well AND is small has been... challenging.

It's hard to give more advice without seeing something like a job posting. I will say, don't limit yourself by framework (but DO say what you use, if it's not greenfield). I prefer Vue but I've built sites/apps in Angular and I have no doubt I could pick up React if I needed to. A "real" senior FE developer isn't going to balk at any of the big 3 frameworks (or minor ones but be ready to explain why you picked something other than Angular/React/Vue).

Usually the existing frontend is a mess and the company has no intention of scrapping it.

Why shoot yourself in the foot with such a ball of stress? Current FE's are happily married.

If an enticing startup came along, maybe. But in this environment it better be REAL enticing.

The job title senior front end is too broad IMO. Since most of the time at early 2000, if we're talking about front end we'll usually deal with complex css, design, and ui/ux. What's worse is usually that skillset is not in align with react at all, since react is more into programming than design.

IMO, it's easier (and more accurate) to search for fullstack nodejs programmer who also know react (or vue, etc).

I think it doesn't help that a lot of places follow FAANG interview style and go for algo/data structures and system design questions.

Recently I went through a generic Sr FE interview at Google (still waiting to find out if I've been ghosted after). There were 5 or 6 rounds, and I feel I totally bombed one of them, excelled at one, and did okay at the others. I think that's acceptable at this level. I went through a "Performance Engineer" interview loop at another company, and the rounds were all specific to the role. I had a much better experience in that interview.

While true, I think it's a bit more nuanced than that.

The most attractive companies have at least 2 of 3 qualities that make front-end work significantly easier:

  - engineering permission to use sensible tooling (typescript, openapi type generation, etc)
  - strong / focused product team (stable roadmap for project requirements)
  - modern ux designers (able to design a component library & can easily communicate changes (Figma))

Companies that don't tend to have front-end work defined by a sense of impermanence, lingering technical debt, and pain.

I’ve had no problems hiring senior devs across the board - FE, BE, DBA, DevOps, etc etc. The existing ones recommend their friends so I imagine it’s a company culture thing as well.

The real trick is to find those who use that tech in new and interesting ways. Those who push the envelope.

There's heaps here in Australia, G'day!

There is also a limit to what you can do in a browser. Many folks get tired of working in this environment and want to branch out and explore more areas of programming / application development.

Also, the constant churning of overengineered tooling, libraries, and frameworks in the modern web ecosystem is another big turn off for a lot of folks.