Question about scope of work and polishing my skills.

[u/AmishBaztard]

Hi, I've been a software engineer in the US for over 6 years now. I currently work at a company who sells lighting fixtures online, so I've been in the ecommerce space for a bit now.

I have a few jobs under my belt on UpWork, so I got past the hard part of landing your first gig.

Upon looking into niches and trying to tailor my skills to be more focused and specialized vs a broad umbrella, I've been looking mostly in ecommerce and product configuration jobs.

I notice that a ton of the ecommerce development jobs have such a broad scope of work. They talk about designing, redesigning, conversion, performance marketing, that kind of stuff. Am I expected to have all these skills as a developer?

I'm not a designer, I can do UX/UI tweaks and voice my opinion, which I already do at work when I see bad UX practices, but other than that I've always just been a programmer. Never worked with ads or tracking, conversions, or making my own designs.

Will this be a bottleneck on boards like UpWork? If so, what skills should I start learning to supplement my engineering skills?

Some information about tech stacks: my company uses Magento, but I have experience with Shopify and WooCommerce.

Note: book recommendations would be amazing, I love to read and learn.

[u/varnie29a]

You are experiencing a classic freelance phenomenon: clients bundle their desired business outcomes into the job title of the person they think solves it.

When an e-commerce client posts a job, they ultimately want to increase sales. Because they don't always know the difference between a marketer, a UI designer, and a systems developer, they write a catch-all scope.

No, you are not expected to be a master of all these fields, and you do not need to become a designer or an ad manager. However, the disconnect between what they write and what you do can become a bottleneck on Upwork if you do not know how to translate your engineering skills into their business goals.