Could you please help me with some career advice as been Junior Web Dev?

[jeanrauwers]

Hi all,

I am a front-end developer with my main skills in the javascript ecosystem and I had some small experience (on college) with C# and .Net .

I have been working as a web dev only for about 5 months now, and I confess that I am struggling to take some decisions about my future main stack (back-end).

I read a lot of information about go, watched some tutorials online and played with it, doing some simple projects.

The syntax is really cool, and every single information that I found about it, the performance and so on make me like it even more.

So far I think I am having a great experience and I am loving every aspect of it.

My main concerns right now would be related to my lack of experience as web developer, because I am thinking about to put all my efforts into learning Go and make it my main skill for the future.

Would be possible for me as Junior Developer be hired as Go developer having just about 1, 1.5 years (thinking forward) of dev experience?

It seems that lots of seniors devs are going to Go, as the most of you did and it makes me be worried about it. because at the moment there are not many jobs here in the UK as we have in different stacks such c# and so on.

I had a chat with some workmates about it and they didn’t think it is a good idea now.

I think when we like what we do is always better, but I will still be having to pay my bills at the end of the month, right?

Please give me some advice on that, because I am really looking forward to learning more Go, I just would like to make sure I am doing at the right time.

Thank you

Jean Rauwers

[lutzhorn]

It is always the right time to learn a new programming language, especially one that uses different concepts than those you already know. So if your main language currently is JavaScript, Go is a good choice to broaden your knowledge. Especially the Go way to do concurrency is something every programmer should learn about.

Go has good tooling and it is easy to write some real code and see results compared to other backend languages like Java.

Your main question seems to be if you should switch from frontend to backend programming. Both are complex areas with huge ecosystems. Maybe frontend technologies are changing a little bit faster than those on the backend. Every programmer always has to keep up with new developments. An important skill is to know which technology, programming language, library, or tool to use for which task. This skill only comes with experience. After doing five months of frontend programming you probably not have invested that much energy into knowledge that will be of limited use for backend programming. So if you really want to move to the backend, you won’t devaluate hard earned skills.

Be aware that much backend programming is done using Java or Node, depending on industry sector and company. If existing systems are written in Java it will not be easy to get a job as a Go programmer.

My advise: Ask yourself why you want to move to the backend. Then look around what skills are required for backend programming. And learn Go anyway

[jeanrauwers]

Thank you for your help.
May I haven’t been clear enough, my bad!
I am looking to become a full-stack and go come to me as something that I liked to work with.
But on this mean time, I want to make sure that I can find a good option to invest and have employability been a developer for less than a year.

But Iam taking your advice, it’s pretty clear and thanks for that.