Developer Roles, Specialties, and Levels Explained
The world of software engineering has a lot of roles within in it, from front-end to full stack to back end to devops. They're all subtly different, and there are certainly specialties within them. Add on top of all that levels and no standardized qualifications, it creates an industry that's not exactly friendly to those getting started or looking to level up.
In this video, I walk through a presentation where I share my experiences from over 10 years of working as a professional software engineer.
I tend to think of the skills like RPG character sheets, so I use that to illustrate the differences between the examples.
The focus is definitely on web application development, but I think a lot of this could apply to iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, etc. developers too. Wherever there's potential for separation between client-side, server-side, and the hosting of the infrastructure, there's the ability for the different roles to exist.
There are definitely roles beyond this too. Larger organizations have specific needs, like Support Engineers and QA Engineers. They'll have different focuses and specialties.
I'm primarily focused on individual contributor roles and not management roles, as that's a separate track and not one I have direct experience with.
Throughout your career, you can definitely move between different roles and specialties and learn toward different ones based on your interest and organization's needs.
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