There is no shortage of stories about great front-end careers. Many of these blog posts tell the truth – careers in web development can be very lucrative. It is also true that as long as someone has desire, she can learn necessary skills and be successful.

In short, front-end developer careers are open to anyone as long as they learn the necessary skills. University degrees, your background and nepotism are secondary to skills. These are all great things about working in this field.

In this blog post, we’ll talk about often overlooked difficulties of working in this field.

Bad management

Most web developers are either freelancers or full-time employees. Whatever you choose to do, you will quickly encounter web developer’s worst nightmare – bad management.

Building web applications requires collaboration and teamwork. The process can only go smoothly if there’s a coordinator (usually product owner) to facilitate collaboration between marketers, designers, front end developers, back end developers, data scientists, and so on.

Bad management can lead to serious issues in web development process. For example, in order to build a functional web application, you need to know structure of data you receive from the API. If data structure turns out to be different from initial plans, you’ll have to do a lot of additional work.

Similarly, changing requirements too frequently can lead to serious problems. In the process of building web applications, team needs to make a lot of big and small decisions. Those decisions influence the final appearance and functionality of the app.

List of requirements influences every decision, big or small. When requirements change, all the decisions must be realigned with new requirements. This is a lot of work. Sometimes web developers have to start over from scratch, or compromise and risk ending up with a subpar product.

Repetitiveness

Large companies hire web developers to build specific components of the UI. Web applications are customized to match their branding and specific business needs.

When working in a large team, often you have to build same user interfaces over and over again – forms, modals, tooltips and so on. Eventually you get used to it, and the job becomes less interesting.

Difficult to get a job

Individual educators and entrepreneurs have created countless courses and bootcamps to help people learn front-end development.

These courses exist because companies need front-end developers to create good looking web applications and user interfaces. Courses are useful and have helped individuals achieve real success.

However, a large number of courses and excessive raving about lucrative front-end careers has led to one big problem – there are too many entry-level front-end developers competing for too few junior positions.

Front-end developers’ work is very important and neets to meet a strict criteria. Doing a poor job can lead to serious problems. Usually companies don’t trust junior web developers to implement these features with the same precision as more experienced developers. That’s why there is actually shortage of middle or senior front-end developers.

For junior front-end devs, job market is different. Inexperienced developers require investment of valuable resources before they’re qualified to work on user interfaces. Not enough companies want to invest in an employee who could leave at any moment.

Following along tutorials or completing a course will not teach you enough to find a job. Working on actual projects for portfolio is a much better way to reinforce your knowledge. And the most valuable is time you spend actually working on the job.

However, to get hired you need actual experience of working on projects. Build a few samples for your portfolio to have some practical experience. Getting a job comes down to honing your skills, keeping up with latest industry trends and having a good portfolio.