How does a career path map work for a Front-end developer?

Yes, there is a "front-end ceiling," meaning it's harder to advance to the senior-most levels in your career if you are very focused on front-end development (web, Android, iOS). A few reasons why:

• The barrier to entry for front-end is usually lower. 10s of thousands of bootcamp graduates (who are already assumed to be less competent) are usually front-end focused.
• The most urgent technical challenge for a startup that has PMF is usually around scaling and reliability. These are backend/infra tasks more than frontend.

Take a look at the data:

• Some companies like LinkedIn pay more for infra engineers than frontend engineers.
• Look at the background of various VPs around the industry and check what kind of engineer they were.

With that said, I still think you can have a great career as a frontend engineer! After you switch into management for a few years, the actual tech stack you worked with starts to matter less.

tl;dr: if you have the option to build more awareness of the full lifecycle of software, I'd do it. I recommend doing this once you get to the Senior level (a terminal level).

🙋 For what it's worth, I'm a front-end dev who went pretty far in their career 😛

There is a very interesting discussion to be had there though as front-end engineering complexity does indeed tend to go down over time. In particular at Big Tech, there is a problem with front-end engineers capping out at senior and struggling to find the technical scope to reach staff. I talk about this in-depth here: https://www.jointaro.com/course/nail-your-promotion-as-a-software-engineer/technical-complexity/

For front-end engineers who want to stay close to product, they often times pick up more scope on the product direction side. At Meta, this is taken to an extreme with a Staff Engineer product hybrid archetype: https://www.jointaro.com/course/grow-from-senior-to-staff-engineer-l5-to-l6/product-hybrid/

Given that you're mid-level, you can definitely go much further staying in front-end though. Front-end has way more complexity than most people think, especially when you truly strive for quality (Airbnb is an excellent example company here).

You'll find a longer career path for frontend engineers at companies where the frontend product contributes significantly to the overall company revenue. You'll have more scope because there will be more teams working on the frontend product, which means the depth chart will be deeper.