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This document discusses front-end development and the career path of Benedict Hobart, a software engineer at Meta. It describes front-end engineering as highly collaborative, requiring work with designers and product managers. It involves both logical, algorithmic thinking as well as creative, user-focused thinking. The document outlines a typical day for Hobart, which involves code reviews, meetings, and supporting other engineers. It emphasizes that front-end engineering is about building products to help people solve problems.

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Saisweth K
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29 views2 pages

Subtitle

This document discusses front-end development and the career path of Benedict Hobart, a software engineer at Meta. It describes front-end engineering as highly collaborative, requiring work with designers and product managers. It involves both logical, algorithmic thinking as well as creative, user-focused thinking. The document outlines a typical day for Hobart, which involves code reviews, meetings, and supporting other engineers. It emphasizes that front-end engineering is about building products to help people solve problems.

Uploaded by

Saisweth K
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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I think why front-end

development is different is you have to work


with designers, you've got to work
with product managers. It's fundamentally
very collaborative. It's got the right-brain
algorithmic thinking and how to make
things performant and work and then it's
got the left-brain. How do you make things
usable and enjoyable to use? I found my way into
front-end engineering and now it's like I couldn't
imagine leaving it. Hello, I'm Benedict Hobart. People call me Benny. I'm a
software engineer at Meta. I think a lot of people that get into
front-end engineering, they think about
front-end engineering as an engineering problem
and you're building stuff, you're solving a problem. When you're doing is
building products for people and you're helping people solve their own problems.
There's a lot of collaboration
that comes with that, working with designers,
working with PMs. You're not some
programmer slouched over a desk typing away all day. It's highly collaborative
environment
you're stepping into. I started when I
was fairly young with building a fan website
for a game called EverQuest. I first started making
websites around that time, but I never really considered
it as a career path. I actually left
building websites and came back to it
later in university. I think where I really actually
started treating it like a career was in my second
year of university, I had a cool cousin who was a programmer then he was like, "You
should
do this subject." What helped me
initially was that I was building something
I was excited by. I think it's the practicality of solving problems
with software, that was really appealing. A typical day is I'll start off working
from home or getting into the office
and reviewing code, helping, giving advice on how things could
be built better. I often have meetings
with designers and product managers on the
things that we want to build. I support a lot of engineers solving the
problems they have. It's wide and varied
and I think that's the exciting thing about getting into
software in general. There's a lot of space to be a different type of engineer. You
could get excited
about solving these really hard technical
challenging problems. But if you're doing it without a purpose, I lose motivation.
It's like knowing that there's someone at the
end of the day I'm hoping helps me focus my energy
on the problems that do need to be solved versus
problems that don't. I've been working on
encrypted messaging, which is seriously important
for a number of reasons. You take it very seriously when you're
building those products that allow people to communicate
safely and privately. When you're solving a
really hard problem, it's easy to think you're
not making any progress. I think everyone talks about imposter syndrome
in the industry. If you're not making progress and you
putting in these hours, you start to think,
should I even be there? Can I solve this problem? That's a hard thing to get over
and that's probably
the worst part of the job. Technically, I think
you're going to learn a lot of what I do
in this course, going through how to write code, how to make it work, how to make
it accessible, and to shipping it to people. Javascript, HTML CSS, Git, these are
all
foundational that you'll find across every web
development company. When it comes to soft skills, there's a lot of empathy trying
to understand other
people's perspectives. Engineers, we care
about performance, we care about accessibility, we care about things
being correct. It usually takes engineers
a long time to understand designer's perspective or
product manager's perspective because you think
so algorithmically, you need to solve every problem versus that 80
percent user problem. I work with a fantastic designer who actually jumps
in on the diffs and I can ask him questions in the code and he can code a bit. I
was talking about empathy, he has an understanding
of the work I do and I've got an understanding
of the work he does. At the end of the day, it's
good to recognize that you're a software engineering
and your job is to bring a lot of their
vision to life. Likewise, a designer when get into your code and tell you how you
should best to architect and structure your code, you need to give advice and
you're there to support him. When you find an issue
it's highly collaborative. A good front-end engineer will actually dip their
toes into back-end. Problem-solving is
consistently hard. Whenever you're learning
and pushing yourself, you're going to run
into roadblocks. Best advice is go
easy on yourself. Going with the mentality
that your goal is to grow and become a software
engineer or a better person. Adopting a growth mindset to developing is going
to be critical. Find time for yourself. I mean, it's not my place to talk about the
psychology
of being easy on yourself, but that's just as
important as any of the engineering
stuff you learn. For me personally,
the role grows. As you build things and
you solve problems, you get perspective
into other problems and it's this idea of
growing your scope. As an engineer yourself,
how do you sort a list and how do you
drop a list on a page? How do you make a button work? By the end of it, you're
working on
encrypted messaging. I think we're at a really exciting point in the industry,
there are a lot of new
exciting technologies. There are a lot of new ways and new products that
are going to be built in the next coming
years and finding those opportunities and solving new problems is
deeply satisfying.

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