The abundance of Frontend Engineers is concerning

Last week I have referred 100+ candidates to my organization and my observation on the skillset of engineers was concerning.

It is been 2 months since I joined Apollo.io which is a remote-first organization with having employee presence in 30+ countries.

Every quarter the company hires depending upon the requirements of different teams and when this quarter's openings resumed, all the employees were encouraged to provide referrals.

I know how struggling it is to find a job from my 8 years of struggles, the hiring was for senior roles (6+) years of experience in backend, frontend, and full stack roles.

I have posted about the hiring news on LinkedIn and have received hundreds of applications.

Here is my observation about the software engineers that have reached out to me.

The most experienced candidate who had reached out had 14 years of experience and had worked in Inutit in the past and has asked me to get referred for staff backend engineer (got rejected for being underqualified).

From the 65 candidates, I have referred.

40 were for the frontend role, and 18 were for backend roles same experience group. 5 for fullstack with 3 being frontend heavy and 2 for the Engineering manager roles with 1 being frontend heavy.

This data made me think that there is an abundance of frontend engineers at all levels, while in the market there is immense demand for seasoned backend engineers.

My personal thinking is that people like me who do not come from the core engineering background, try to get into the tech with the frontend stack (web development) as it does not involve heavy DSA grilling in the interviews and the resource is also in large.

While there is no harm, if the pool becomes large the competition gets stiff.

In my first interaction with my Engineering manager, he asked me to move to a full stack role, with being frontend heavy as frontend is my forte.

Experience speaks more than anything and now I think he is right, I would advise others as well, from your primary skillset, to adopt a secondary skill as well.

It is a competitive world and we have to monitor every small observation, thus I am sharing mine with you, you do your studies as well.

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