Back end or Front end Development?

I'm new at this too but I've done a lot of research. You raise a good point in that you want to make the right choice for your career path. What, ultimately, is going to get you hired with a desirable wage is a very important consideration.

I looked at the job postings locally here (in New Zealand), and I see Senior Front End Developers earning maybe $90,000 NZD, while a senior Ruby on Rails developer can get as much as $150,000 NZD in some instances. Yet I see nearly 20 pages of jobs for Front End and merely 2 pages for Ruby on Rails.

So, I'd say, starting out there is a lot more opportunity for general Front-end skills, while if you're playing the long game, you may want to become more of a specialist in a language with a steeper learning curve. The truth is you could do either/or.

In any case, I would say you have to follow your interests and passion if you expect to be good at what you do. If you like Ruby on Rails and it excites you, get into that. On the other hand, if you are still having fun with Front-end stuff, take up some projects for that and build your portfolio in the process. Just be passionate and committed to whatever you do and you will find success.

Don't worry about making all the right decisions up front. Just dive in!

There is always a future for front end developers but you will need to be more then that to stay employed in most cases. A front end developer who is also a designer and is fantastic at responsive design will be around a lot longer then someone who can simply turn a design into html. The more you know the more you are worth.

A knowledge of content managment systems such as wordpress is useful too. There are some people who make a living off of creating Wordpress themes. What that is is building a great front end and connecting it into Wordpress. Learning PHP or Ruby will give you extra abilitys which increase your marketablity. Even bussiness could help. If all you are is a front end dev then you will lose out to someone who is more. If you want the job be more the just a front end guy.

All this said don't over extend yourself. Find marketable skills and focus on them.

Hope this helps!

That's not true, and it depends on the company too. There are companies who are looking for full-stack developers, or there are companies out there who have teams of back-end developers, front-developers, and so on who works together to get the project done. Knowing more than one technology doesn't hurt either, and it is consider a plus too. If you want to focus on front-end development, of course you should know HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, AJAX, JSON, and JavaScript OOP. However, the more front-end frameworks/libraries you know, the more you will get a chance to get hired and become a front-end developer. My suggestion is once you have a good understanding of HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, AJAX, JSON, and JavaScript OOP, you should focus on Bootstrap, jQuery, AngularJS, Backbone.js, Knockout.js, Ember.js(these are the most common ones in my head)...You should look up companies near you and see their front-end job description to see the most common front-end libraries they are using, and you should learn it.

Thank you all for your positive and quick feed back, I believe Benjamin said it best with

"Don't worry about making all the right decisions up front. Just dive in!"

again thanks to all who commented and gave feedback on my question best of luck to all of you.

Todd Schneider