The SaaS Org Chart

Re:The SaaS Org Chart by rokkit on Sunday July 25, 2021 @04:58PM (#27952856)

Why do the number of front end devs exceed the back end? Does anyone else see a problem here? Front end effort has always been a fraction of back end effort on the systems I've developed. If that's not the case, I can only hypothesize it's because front end toolchains have gotten overly complex for what they accomplish. Not only that, but I would posit that for most SaaS ventures, the back end is where the differentiation and value is delivered, so that is where the bulk of dev resources should be deployed.

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Re:The SaaS Org Chart by granshaw on Sunday July 25, 2021 @05:10PM (#27952948)

The standard of polish that users expect has gone up a lot. The Front end is what users actually interact with, to them it might as well be your entire stack

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Re:The SaaS Org Chart by matteovh on Sunday July 25, 2021 @05:14PM (#27952968)

Backend dev has basically become CRUD API development whereas products end up being differentiated by brand and UX polish.

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Re:The SaaS Org Chart by gedy on Sunday July 25, 2021 @05:23PM (#27953044)

Of the consumer/Enterprise SaaS companies I've worked with, many devs who say they are doing "backend" are just writing controllers and APIs specifically for front end/UI consumption.

A lot of places have combined that work into same stack/JS and call it "frontend".

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Re:The SaaS Org Chart by golergka on Monday July 26, 2021 @05:49AM (#27957511)

I think that those figures are the kind of estimates that only make sense in aggregate: when it says 8 front-end developers, I just assume that it has a standard deviation of at least 4.

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Re:The SaaS Org Chart by fatnoah on Monday July 26, 2021 @12:37PM (#27961573)

I've been a back-end dev at one of those places. When the front-end is comprised of Android, iOS, Web, and even Windows Phone, a senior and productive back-end team can easily serve multiple front-end teams.

In my case, a back-end team of 4 owned everything "non-app" while about 10 engineers owned the various front-ends.

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Re:The SaaS Org Chart by tnolet on Monday July 26, 2021 @06:32AM (#27957796)

I'm more surprised with the 1 person DevOps. Good luck to that person being on-call 24/7, 365 days a year!

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Re:The SaaS Org Chart by jen20 on Monday July 26, 2021 @09:45AM (#27959268)

The entire point of “DevOps” is not to be a position at all - so the number of “DevOps” hires should be 0.

DevOps is a mindset of bridging operational and development teams to improve the delivery of work done to a place where it can deliver value.

If the author means an “SRE”, he should say that - though the discussion about “you write it, you run it” can be left for a different day.

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Re:The SaaS Org Chart by tnolet on Monday July 26, 2021 @03:50PM (#27964485)

yes, that the theory. In practice, "DevOps" is 100% a position and he/she will probably be on the hook for uptime etc.

I don't agree with any of that, but that's how the cookie has crumbled.

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Re:The SaaS Org Chart by devmunchies on Sunday July 25, 2021 @11:32PM (#27955305)

at a startup with less than 50 people, the frontend engineers will typically manage "frontend services", which includes the backend that directly serves the frontend. basically full stack, which was't included.

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Re:The SaaS Org Chart by imperfectcats on Monday July 26, 2021 @06:15AM (#27957695)

They don't do they?

By my count all the non-front end devs do back end, so Client Applications (2), Core Services/Platform (1) & Dev Ops/Infra (1)

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Re:The SaaS Org Chart by dzonga on Sunday July 25, 2021 @11:31PM (#27955297)

yeah, as someone who has worked on both ends of the stack, that was confusing as hell. if you only need backend dev's on a 1:2 ratio with frontend, then your product ain't complex to begin with to warrant a separate frontend team.

but then having vc money contributes to decisions most of us, will never understand.

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