I moved from back to front and I can confidently say for me the backend is much easier. But it probably has something to do with doing it so long. I imagine given time I'd decide they're about the same difficulty.
Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
171–179 of 179 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#172Backend is not easier. However, it will be easier to stay up to date given that most concepts are not changing for each frameworks.
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#173I have so much empathy for people in this kind of situation. There's a brutal inhumanity about the tech hype cycle and how it deprecates and discards skills that humans poured their soul into learning in good faith. What should be rich and rewarding careers building on experience and knowledge, continuously gaining over time, become more like a mouse wheel ... constantly running just to keep up... until you eventuall…
yes, i often think about what really drives this constant cycle of change.
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
> learned lots of back-end and dev-ops-y stuff, bash scripting , linux etc I use shell scripts and Linux for front end every day. Modern frontend is quite programmatic. > However, they can crash at age 30+ when those front-end skills aren't cool anymore You've seen a lot of front enders age out of it? Why would this be? My whole team are frontenders in their 30s.
Possibly you answered your own Q there? ;). Using scripts, Linux plentifully in a front-end job, might indicate being a bit more full-stack than you call yourselves, and hence, you've got some long-life skills alongside the Angular/React/whatever. I'm not saying everyone ages out of it, just I'd seen it as a thing for some people. I speak as someone now a bit old for tech (late 40s) , yet somehow managing to have a m…
Any chance you could list the skills/knowledge you feel have kept you marketable?
Asking as I'm just about to reach mid forties and I'm a Frontender who feels the same as the OP.
If I have a go at moving to backend one concern I have is that I wouldn't know what skills are just nice to have's and what's an essential skill so I could waste too much time learning the wrong things.
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Possibly you answered your own Q there? ;). Using scripts, Linux plentifully in a front-end job, might indicate being a bit more full-stack than you call yourselves, and hence, you've got some long-life skills alongside the Angular/React/whatever. I'm not saying everyone ages out of it, just I'd seen it as a thing for some people. I speak as someone now a bit old for tech (late 40s) , yet somehow managing to have a m…
Any chance you could list the skills/knowledge you feel have kept you marketable? Asking as I'm just about to reach mid forties and I'm a Frontender who feels the same as the OP. If I have a go at moving to backend one concern I have is that I wouldn't know what skills are just nice to have's and what's an essential skill so I could waste too much time learning the wrong things.
Sure. Glad to help :). Bash/zsh/scripting in general, combined with nice productivity tools like fzf, vim (really speeds up your work when you know it well and you can get vim plugins for VSCode/PHPStorm/InteliiJ etc). However, don't sweat not knowing vim if you at least have one very good editor available everywhere that you know well. Docker, (which often just amounts to knowing what shell script to put in a dockerfile), fair amount of exposure to AWS, short-cutted by using the command line cli combined with jq. (AWS is a beast, so don't try to keep on top of it all, but master the basics like e:g how to list S3 bucket from command line), some exposure to Terraform, wouldn't say I really know it, but I could edit some tf files and add stuff then go in the AWS console and look what it created (but I'm really a dev, not an infrastructure eng, so this works out to be enough). Python (lots and lots of it). Python is super useful for knocking out stuff quickly. Python will always be useful IMHO, for decades I believe. PHP I don't know fantastically but I can scrape by. Java ditto although I really don't like Java. C++ I did years ago , for years, don't really do it now much but occasionally comes up. Makefiles = a truly ancient but v useful skill. Soft skills like being pedantic about nailing down requirements precisely. Being nice to other team members and easy to work with (but I'll let them be the judge of that ;) ). One key thing I think is I always adored the command line, and shunned GUIs , not a massive fan of IDEs. Guess which one of those stays current and guess which one gets completely changed around and/or falls out of fashion. ; git- make sure you know that reasonably well especially the command line (sure its a PITA to get to grips with, but worth it). In general, mess about with Linux a little bit in your spare time (within reason, not letting it get in the way of family time.). See if your partner will switch to Linux even if not a geek. My wife has, and MS Windows drives her nuts compared to it. ;). Even our daughter messed about with some terminal commands like cowsay etc. ;). why is that even relevant here, well it keeps you in that groove of discovery and enjoyment. IMHO anyway. ;). running C sharp/dot-net core on Linux is something I enjoyed , nice language on a nice platform..
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Write automated tests for your code as you're writing it. Hitting the entire system is fine. If your code is properly factored then it should be easy to do. If not, then you get to learn how to factor your code. Test your backend with real data, not playsets. So use millions of records instead of 3-4. If you're touching database, then learn SQL, and learn the tooling for your database. Learn how to read a query plan,…
Thanks a lot for the advice, really appreciate it!
My pleasure. Hope that it helps. If you check out some of the "TDD with .Net guides" or "TDD with Java" (Pluralsight, Youtube) then you can see the flow in action.
Backenders struggle with the same thing in the frontend but in reverse. For frontend, you need to be interacting constantly - the shorter the loop between code and frontend, the better.
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, if you learned React you'd have a decent shelf life still. What if you learned classic AngularJS, due to go unsupported in a month and a half? What if you threw in with ExtJS ages ago and the enterprise corp you've been using it for just downsized and outsourced your project? Maybe you were an EmberJS aficionado but can't find new gigs using it. I worked on a greenfield project in Backbone/Thorax/Mustache a numb…
Skills transfer across frameworks and even languages. If you're good at Elm or Clojure, you would be great at React. Vue owes a lot of its structure to the original Angular (or at least it did when I learned it forever ago).
Sure, skills do apply across frameworks and languages. The hundred stupid things you need to know about any given framework don't, though.
To be clear, I'm not thinking about people who've used lots of languages and tools here. I've done time working for huge corporations for whom software is a cost center, and it's easy to find people in those contexts who are competent with the tools they know but have narrow enough experience that moving to something else is difficult for them.
The "average Joe" programmer's experience is what I'm thinking of here.
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#178Tl;dr: Nothing is easier, both have their own sets of issues.
I have been at all sorts of Backend/Frontend combinations. An app or service with Good UI/UX and animation can't survive if they don't get required data in time from their servers. And a good scalable backend is useless without a UI/UX conveying clear messages & indication to users.
If something goes wrong at frontend, it affects only one (or one set of) user(s). If something goes wrong in backend, entire system messes up. The joy of showing beutiful apps and the joy of serving something to millions of users without hiccups are equal in my mind.
And after spending almost a decade in frontend (Android mobile to be precise), I find backend has more interesting. I have written about my journey here[1]. And I want to spend my tech career handling things at scale.
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#179Back-end usually requires more thinking while front-end requires more fiddling.