I’ve never worked at an early stage startup. For the last decade, I have been hired at four companies after they had found product/market fit, they “moved fast and broke things” and saw their velocity slow to a crawl because what got them here won’t get them there. (I never fault a company for having a horrible architecture if it got them off the ground, they got funding and survived to get to the point they are (see Twitter).

They needed to hire people to mentor and to help them implement better processes but at the same time being a hands on developer.

But, I have seen plenty of times where the company had an in house designer to design mockups of the UI and hire either a contractor that worked on site or a junior boot camp grad that knew $frontend_framework_of_the_week to save the heavy lifting for the senior devs/FTEs.

On one hand it seems like competent front end developers who can do “good enough” front end development and design are a dime a dozen and you can pay them peanuts. On the other hand, while I know HTML/CSS well enough to do some ugly internal site and I know JS well, I could never go from empty git repo to a well designed single page app on the front end. There is some type of mental barrier when it comes to me being a modern front end developer.

But if you give me a budget, time, and admin credentials to an AWS account, I can go from empty repo, no infrastructure to a fully baked backend solution with a full network infrastructure, database, cache, CI/CD solution easily (been there done that).