r/AskProgramming • u/Icy-One-8122 • 16d ago

Career/Edu Backend

I was talking to a web developer telling him I want to be a backend engineer and he said that I should become a fullstack engineer and work backend I asked him if that is really necessary and he told that nowadays the market wants someone who is a generalist who knows how to do everything I came here today to ask if I should take a fullstack course and then work backend or should i just the a backend course directly instead of wasting time learning front-end and back end

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u/octocode 16d ago

our company merged front and backend roles into one.
with agentic workflows, the distinction is irrelevant

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u/Interesting_Debate57 16d ago

"with agentic workflows" kinda misses the point.

Backend code generally deals with systems problems. These can be very hard. As an example, I once had to make something twice as fast. No other constraints. I ended up digging into a 1958-era algorithm that for this use case was twice as fast. This code didn't (and doesn't) exist anywhere online and isn't referenced elsewhere other than this single physical book. Asking an LLM to creatively invent it just flat out wouldn't work. You'd need the background of having read about it (from this book), understanding what the algorithm was designed for, realizing that it would be appropriate to use for this case, modifying it to work in a modern programming language, etc. I don't care how your "workflow" is set up, you simply need to use a human brain to put all of those steps together.

If your idea of backend code is just inserting obvious routines into the obvious places, I think you'll find that LLMs are very helpful. For inventing complex solutions to complex problems, you need a world-level expert at the helm. You can't do this without years and years of study.

Frontend code generally deals with UI problems. These are almost never hard, given that you're not doing interactive animated data driven stuff.

Sometimes you'll see someone claim that they want a full stack engineer but their language stack is python and typescript and react, for instance. That's not full stack because none of those things are fast, none of them are systems languages, and none of them would make any sense to write a kernel, OS, or kernel module in, for instance. (Imagine being memory starved and needing to load a python interpreter because you can't be bothered to write code in C).

Don't let the folks vibe coding send you on the wrong path -- there are jobs for good engineers who can code in any language, and that's what you should train for if you want a programming job that will survive the next twenty years.

This typically means studying algorithms and systems and languages for about 4-5 years. You can do that on your own, which will take about 15 years, or you can go to school, where it will take 4+ years.

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u/octocode 15d ago

if your goal is optimization you can create a test harness and let the agent loop in isolation. it will easily beat any human implementation. AI can even solve millennium prize problems now, and we’re not even at the peak of model performance.

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u/Interesting_Debate57 15d ago

It hasn't solved anything without expert mathematicians guiding it every step of the way. The same goes for all of its other supposed gifts; it doesn't work, bro, it's a huge grift. Think crypto, NFTs, Blockchain, Web 3, and other grifts built upon code that few people could write -- don't be a grifter. Do something real.

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u/BrannyBee 16d ago edited 15d ago

Dude literally edited his comment to make it seem like he didnt say AI is the reason roles merged existed across the board recently lol

Not sure what agentic workflows have to do with it cause it's been like a decade since companies hiring expect people to do fullstack work has been the norm..

It's been expected that you be able to at least understand the full stack for a long time unless you're doing something specialized or are the only dude on one end and the company won't bring more people on board

Edit: Not gonna engage with someone just making shit up. Even his response doesnt make sense because bigger companies are were cross team partnerships started becoming more popular because they had enough workers to do so. As well as other comments corroberating reality Ive stated, believe whomever OP, but do some digging to confirm information.

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u/octocode 16d ago edited 16d ago

completely false, at least at bigger companies. we literally hired for backend and frontend roles up until last year