I encourage engineers to explore and find new projects to improve the overall system. I began noticing most projects were backend instead of the frontend, which was around 90%. This also meant 9/10 engineers eventually became backend-focused. Most of the fires and outages came from the backend meaning my attention was spent there.
I’m also a backend engineer by heart. I enjoy chaining systems together, examining distributed algorithms, and bolstering our infrastructure. I tend to read a paper on Raft instead of catching up with the latest javascript framework. I’m biased. I unintentionally divert most of my time and resources on the backend even when there were no issues.
My team’s smart. They’d pick up on my preferences.
The team needed a rebalance. I pushed for hiring more frontend talent. No matter how polished our backend looked, the frontend needed help. The product was looking shabby and the frontend is what the customer interacts with. We eventually picked up a full-time engineer and a few interns to work on the frontend. Then they saw the backend team having too much fun.
Enthusiasm is contagious.
I’m always in a bind when in a 1 on 1, someone working on the frontend wants to try out backend projects. This is a difficult situation for me. Enforcing project boundaries didn’t work. Ultimately one engineer would want to work permanently on the backend. I like my engineers to grow and blocking that desire would be contradictory.
From my observations, most of the backend engineers on the team assumed frontend required design skills. I had to explain frontend required knowledge around browser compatibility issues, tuning the performance of the UI, identifying new libraries, and possibly working with a CDN. None of these are trivial projects.
Here’s what I could have done differently –
- I should’ve hired a designer. This would have eased my previous concern about backend engineers thinking they needed to cover artistic projects.
- Screen harder for front-end engineers willing to stay on the front-end. I don’t have exact numbers on hand, but I did not build a good filter for screening frontend talent.
- Pay attention where I’m allocating my attention. If I cared deeply about frontend, then here’s how I can show it. I would talk about the problems frontend is experiencing and the impact on customers. Showing a few screen recordings or having an engineer talk to a customer makes a difference. I could have assigned a few backend engineers interested in understanding the issues around frontend and help out.
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