Question about full stack developer career

Career (You Can Do This!)
1

Hi,
I started a new job as a full-stack engineer at a big company after 3.5 years of experience with Angular, Node.js, and Java.

In my previous positions I used to work on systems that have various objects with relations between them (relational database), in most of the features I built UI components that call rest APIs where I do logic that consists of validations, maybe other rest calls, Redis caching, transactions that perform CRUD operations on the database. And I worked on both monolith and microservice systems.

In my new job, I work in a big-data system (as a full-stack engineer), the company is well known and has very professional people, but I feel a little bit weird because I am doing things that are a little bit different than what I used to do, most of the work is related to transformations and actions to the data, the main technologies I use are Angular, Java, Scala, Spark, Kafka.

In this new job, I do fewer standard DB operations on objects (performing transactions, joining tables, …), even the APIs are not really Rest-APIs because most of them are query results that have data analytics, which doesn’t fully utilize the Restful features (like GET\POST\PUT\DELETE operations on objects), also the UI side is mostly displaying data in graphs\charts.

I still think the work is interesting, but I am a little bit concerned if it is a good experience for the future because I am missing working with commonly used stuff that I used
to do (like Standard Restful-APIs, commonly used ORMs, managing objects life-cycle in the database, push notifications, …).

I am interested in continuing to work as a full-stack developer in the future, and I am wondering how my career as a full-stack developer will look like if I proceed in this direction, in terms of job opportunities in the future.

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Sorry to be blunt here, but this is your job, you are bring paid to program things. The tools are always slightly different. If you want to go back to working with tools that you’re more comfortable with, then you’re going to have to look for a new job. If you only want to work with the specific set of tools you used in your last job, then you’re going to have to try to get your old job back. This is the nature of the job. Unless you stay in the same job forever and that job involves maintaining the same system, you have to expect that you’re gonna need to learn to use some different tools at some point.

“Full-stack developer” is a term so vague as to be almost meaningless, but it seems very much to be what you’re employed as at the minute, albeit with less focus on end-user (browser) UI

Edit: this all sounded extremely negative
It is a bit, but I do understand where you’re coming from: you’ve spent three and a half years using one specific combination of technologies, and now you’ve been thrown into an environment where you have to use things you aren’t as familiar with. But there are hundreds of different common tools, and an almost infinite number of ways they can be combined, the chances of you using the same stack in a new job are pretty low.

1 Like
3

Is the concern that you might not be developing marketable skills while working at this company?

Sounds to me like you’re working with extremely large datasets and developing some niche skills. You’re probably better off on the path you’ve started treading then sticking to generic CRUD operations.

If you’re worried about losing touch of other skills you feel are important you can always pick up side projects or just try to make room in your regular work day for personal development.

Cheers!

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I am also learning Full stack from online. Thanks for this information regarding this