I am a backend engineer and after 9 years at a company I jumped ship to a French company that switched to 100% remote and was willing to pay me 45% more (that’s huge!).
Long story short, after 6 interviews I accepted the position to join a team and build a Nodejs backend, being promised the opportunity to pitch in the GraphQL idea.
Sounds great, right? Can you blame me for being super excited to start ?
Well, 1 month in, the management cannot see any reason to build an in-house backend when we can just get a headless CMS and integrate stuff with it. “Out of the box…”
My new job proves to be “integration” of features with the CMS and help develop the front-end.
Has anyone experienced anything like this ? How did you handle it?
Are CMSes the future of backends?
I’m confused and lost…
Top comments (7)
I think in the modern world always having the middleware talk directly to the DB doesn't always make sense. Basically if a CMS can be used then it probably should be used. I'd consider it a great opportunity to learn new skills and go with it. It gives you a much easier visibility into your data and dealing with SQL to pull things out.
Isn’t extending them and adding Integration a PITA?
I probably exaggerated by saying they should be used if they can be. I just meant if they can do what you need out of the box it seems easier than implementing all of it in a DB, just to get the same result.
I understand that. But I believe the problem begins when someone needs custom logic added to those DB models. Or some functionality that is not out of the box.
You either start building a gateway API or - if it’s a big CMS - you start extending it. This means that you have to learn it. It’s quite a niche thing to learn that wouldn’t probably help you in the future.(unless one plans to become like a WordPress plug-in developer, but for another platform)
That's a great point. I agree with all that completely. That reminds me of why I hated JBPM so much, for example, and will never work in JBPM again...if it's still even in use. With SQL you "know" precisely what it's doing, but with these proprietary super complex not-so-well documented contraptions things get murky and ugly fast.
It depends on the company and what its objectives are. There is nothing wrong with headless CMS they have many use cases and I much prefer them to compared to WordPress.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against the concept.
I just can’t figure out why I was hired…
It’s not like I have any experience with CMSes or any interest in learning…