The state of the front-end and full-stack job market

After an engaging discussion about the front-end and full-stack market, I couldn’t stop wondering: Are my skills and interests in demand? While there are plenty of development-related surveys, the results gauge preference and interest, not demand. To get the answer to my question, I had to read job openings — a lot of them.

Research

While I considered putting in a ton of manual labour, I couldn’t deny myself the opportunity to write software to do the heavy lifting, so I automated the collection and analysis of vacancies.

Finding information, like technology and compensation, in a body of text is non-trivial. Many terms can refer to or imply a specific technology. For example, a11y is an alias of accessibility, the framework Next.js implies React, and crypto could refer to cryptocurrency or cryptography.

Instead of dealing with hallucinations of a large language model (LLM), I decided to stick to plain text matching to analyse the body text. This approach is not perfect — there will be false positives. Sentences like “our product is lit”, “‘go out and build’ is our motto” and “meet the office pet, Ruby” are clearly not about technologies, but this approach will tag these texts with Lit, Go, and Ruby respectively. Nonetheless, these are edge cases and the approach works well enough to get reliable data and draw valid conclusions.

As for compensation, these are often presented as ranges in various formats and with varying payout cadences (e.g. “$5-7k a month”), making them a pain to parse. I erred on caution and only parse compensation ranges in a handful of formats. Outliers, like exceptionally low salaries, are omitted.

It’s important to note the data sources are biased towards startups, scale-ups, and product companies based in the United States and Europe. While I assume it doesn’t affect the use of technology that much, compensation varies greatly depending on company type and location.

With a dataset of 595 job vacancies, let’s see if we can learn anything interesting.

Which technologies are in demand?

Let’s start with styling. What tools are used to author styles, if any?

Disappointingly, only ~22.5% (134) of the openings mention styling at all. What is interesting, is that of the job listings that do mention styling, ~40.3% (54) list no tools. This could mean that vanilla CSS is (still) immensely popular, though it’s likely that CSS is often used as an umbrella term and styling tools are considered too insignificant to mention.

When styling tools are mentioned, Tailwind takes the lead.

A staggering ~53.1% (316) of the openings mention some kind of rendering library or front-end framework.

No new insights here — React continues to be the most popular rendering library.

With React dominating the space, of course, the most popular framework is React-based, which is Next.js. The framework is mentioned in ~17.8% (106) of all openings.

I’m sad to learn that teams do not share my enthusiasm for Astro. With it being mentioned in only ~3% (18) of the openings, I’m unlikely to land a job where I get to build apps with the best framework. Perhaps people will see Astro’s potential in a year or two!

While JavaScript is prevalent in web development, it’s clear that it’s not the only programming language that’s in demand in this space. With some Ruby or Python experience, the pool of relevant openings grows significantly.

Where do people host web apps nowadays?

AWS leaves everything else behind and is, by far, the most popular cloud service provider. Vercel takes the lead in the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) space. I didn’t expect Supabase to be on par with Heroku and Firebase. It’s nice to see an open-source and self-hostable option on the list!

With all that computational power at our disposal, we can connect our apps to a database. What’s in demand right now?

Few database-as-a-service providers (DBaaS) made it to the list as these are rarely mentioned in openings. I assume this is because most DBaaS leverage well-established database engines and experience with those will get you up and running just as well.

Our good old PostgreSQL is still going strong. If it ain’t broken…

Which JavaScript ORMs are used to connect to these databases?

Based on only a handful of mentions, Prisma is way up there. Drizzle is still growing in popularity, so perhaps it’ll catch up with Prisma, at some point.

Finally, here’s a complete list of all technologies detected (≥2 for brevity) and their occurrence.

Experience

Am I getting too old for this job? Perhaps. Most openings with a minimum level of experience required, virtually always ask for less than 10 years of experience. Potentially, this is where people are expected to switch to other roles.

Compensation

While I love developing software and products, I also love to be able to pay my bills. Let’s have a look at compensation. Please remember that data is biased towards companies located in the United States of America (US).

Based on 283 openings with a salary range in dollars, which I assumed are USD, we can get a decent salary range plot for that currency. Most openings are in the $100-250k per year range.

This is a bit higher than the base salary ranges reported by Indeed. For front-end devs in the US, it lists a range of approximately $70-190k (source). It’s $80-200k for full-stack devs (source). My guess is that their data is more reliable.

Compensation by technology

With a list of technologies and compensation, we can calculate which skills are most valued. Even after removing outliers, it’s a surprising list I can’t make sense of. Learn WordPress, y’all???

Compensation by experience

Do we get better compensation as we gain experience? I assumed that we would, but it seems we barely do. The two lines represent an approximation of the minimum and maximum of the salary ranges offered.

Take this with a grain of salt because the regression for the salary range maximum would amount to an approximate 1-2% increase each year, which is rarely enough to cover inflation.

Front-end v.s. full-stack

Some front-end openings look like full-stack openings and it’s the other way around, as well. Are they truly that similar?

The graph below shows whether a topic is represented more in front-end or full-stack openings. D3.js, for example, is shown all the way on the left, meaning mention of this library only exists in front-end openings. Vacancies that mention Perl, which can be seen all the way on the right, are always full-stack openings.

Where technologies end on this spectrum mostly checks out, but there are some surprises. For example, I didn’t expect Google Cloud, Cassandra, MSSQL, MongoDB Atlas, and C# to be mentioned significantly more often in front-end openings.

While it’s tempting to look at this graph and conclude that only one of these roles is interesting to you, with 32.8% (195) of the collected openings being specifically front-end, you may miss out on good opportunities by doubling down on a specific role.

Is a degree required?

It seems not.

No one cares about an associate degree. About 13.9% (83) of the job openings mention a bachelor’s degree. While some openings mention a master’s degree 5.9% (35) or PhD 1.8% (11), a couple of these are false positives where the opening boasts about the education level of founders or partners.

As a European, my impression is Europeans care much less about education levels than people in the United States do, so I’m surprised to see few openings requiring a degree, especially considering the data is skewed towards the States.

Are companies inclusive?

Only ~7.1% (42) of the job openings mention accessibility. Fuck that. I’m sure some companies have accessibility experts do the heavy lifting and don’t need all engineers to be accessibility-savvy, but that’s not going to compensate for that embarrassing figure. As an industry, we don’t care enough.

Diversity, equity, and/or inclusion are mentioned in ~34.5% (205) of the job openings. I’m conflicted — it’s both surprisingly more than I anticipated, yet significantly less than I hoped.

Will we get beverages?

A couple of years ago, when the software engineering business was booming, a lot of job openings had these random perks to lure in talent. One of these perks was the presence of free beverages, usually beer, to appeal to the stereotype of beer-drinking white young men. It was stupidly common.

While I’m sure many companies still have parties and such, at least it’s no longer a perk that publically is offered everywhere. Very few openings mention any kind of beverage 0.5% (3). It’s still exclusively beer, though.

Final thoughts

This was a fun little research project, but I haven’t learned much. A lot of the conclusions are in line with what I already thought, though having the numbers does add context. For example, I knew React was the most popular rendering library, but I didn’t know it was at least 3 times more in demand than anything else.

There are some topics I want to learn more about to ensure my profile aligns better with what’s in demand because, unfortunately, it doesn’t exactly align with my preference. In fact, I object to some of the popular tools and principles, but while the market is rough, I’m willing to let some loosely held principles slide if that opens up opportunities.