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Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?

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Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?

#61

Post by indiantinker »

Front-end is more noisy and fast changing while backend may not be like that. I would say difficulty is very subjective thing. In backend you can trust your tools and they are mostly reliable. The tooling is good and documentation is nicer. It may seem less punk but it is the backbone of the web, in many cases.

Front-end, on the other hand is more precarious. Things change all the time, so it is way more iterative and it needs tooling that respects that (like CI/CD). There is also compatibility issues due to devices. Plus, these days everyone wants to be a front end person and live a life of freedom. Its the new nirvana. Very noisy.

Consider an imperfect analogy of a face and the body. People care about the face a lot. There are tons of makeups for the face. It can be changed fast. This is what I feel about the front end.

The body is more like the backend. It takes a bit more time to change it and investments in it provides value over time.

Hence, they are equally difficult and easy.

Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?

#62

Post by shaolinspirit »

radicalbyte wrote: post #43
radicalbyte wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The is only true at a small scale. The frontend is often like the tip of the iceberg - it hides an enormous amount of complexity. I've worked on a lot of systems in my career and I have found there to be a lot more complex and interesting problems in the "backend" than in "frontend". With backend development, there are very real consequences for making mistakes, and you have a high chance of being punished for making…

Oh: and I must say that modern frameworks have made frontend development much easier than it used to be. With Angular, Vue, React you can actually apply the good engineering practises to structure your code in a way that makes it more manageable than it was in the past (with JQuery + server-side templates). The testing frameworks are also pretty good, helped a lot by the frameworks being built properly (inversion of…

definitely, frameworks are great for a lot of use cases. I was as well touching a little bit mobile dev, which is still in some sense hard. You need in each app write a little "browser engine" with websockets, rest api with http cache, image caching and a lot of other things that the classical browser environment gives web developers for free.

Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?

#63

Post by milkers »

smitty1e wrote: post #46
hnlmorg wrote: post #28

Easier in some ways, harder in others. Easier: + You don't need to write a thousand edge case code to cover different devices + There's less "trial and error" trying to figure out what sequence of CSS properties is needed to adjust some of the simplest of designs + More choices of languages available (should Javascript / Typescript not float your boat) + More consistency in that you only need to worry about your back…

Back End owns more of the infrastructure, including the admin, pipeline, and networking chores. But the UX seems the 20% of the system eating 80% of the time, yes.

That is the ratio thank you! From the 5+ years experience I have, BE tasks always consume less time than FE tasks. One of the reasons for it is that, BE works get commented by technical people and technical people easy to get along well and understand each other and the decisions. However FE works get commented by a larger audience either technical or non-technical. Each comment delays the acceptance of the work done. And mostly it is harder to persuade a non-tech person about the limitations of the current technology.

Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?

#64

Post by nickd2001 »

IMHO, back-end is a better long-term career investment, as it changes slower, less faddish, and you learn skills applicable to many situations. Its not easier, if anything actually harder, but more satisfying in my experience. I've noticed many early-to mid 20s devs love front-end, the new and shiny, it feels creative and "cool" to them. However, they can crash at age 30+ when those front-end skills aren't cool anymore, if that's all they have. Whereas, had they learned lots of back-end and dev-ops-y stuff, bash scripting , linux etc, those are longer value skills. I write this as basically a full-stack dev, although much stronger on backend and devops than the latest JS libraries. As someone well the wrong side of 40, this particular skills choice has served me well in terms of still being marketable despite being older. So my advice = invest in back-end skills whatever you do

Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?

#65

Post by hooby »

Different setups will come with vastly differing requirements for their backends and frontends.

So, depending on how your project works, what tech-stack is being used etc., it might be that either backend OR frontend is "easier" for that one specific case. But I don't think you can generalize that.

In general, backend is definitely different - and comes with a different set of difficulties. But I really don't feel confident declaring it harder or easier than frontend overall.

Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?

#66

Post by tannhaeuser »

austincheney wrote: post #11

There is a bias in software: if you can see it visually it’s worth less. That bias has generally resulted in lower compensation for front end work irrespective of inherent technical challenges. The result of that bias impacts hiring and trust which then dictate approach and implementation.

I think this could be reformulated: the result of backend development has less immediately visible consequences, thus more potential for catastrophic errors hence requires more testing and planning in advance (whereas UI testing in the limit is difficult).

Also, if anything, the last couple of years have shown that front end development, and web dev in particular, is highly prone to churn. Hence managers might be tempted to think of a front end as a throw-away component that needs to be redone anyway a couple years down the road when no web dev wants to touch legacy code not using the latest and greatest tech stack, and the relative difficulty of UI testing adds to that. Now why there's so much churn in web dev is another question. One hypothesis is that it's a field seeing lots of freshman; as such, the wealth of frameworks we're seeing is left as a trail of those younger devs learning to make sense of webdev ;) But maybe it's simply that requirements and expectations are changing all the time.

Personally, I'm not at all of the opinion that frontend coding is or should be less valuable than backend.

Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?

#67

Post by DarkWiiPlayer »

Saying that either one is easier or harder would not make much sense. Back-end deals with different problems than front-end, and is "easier" in some aspects but "harder" in others.

Backend tends to be a bit slower and less hype-driven. You certainly won't get anything close to the almost half-yearly hype loops of javascript where you basically have to append "2021" to every search to get an up-to-date result. Of course things still change, otherwise we'd still be using COBOL, but it happens at a much slower pace.

Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?

#68

Post by anhldbk »

A big NO.

IMHO no matter end at which you work, it takes time to truely master necessary skills.

Find a mentor. He/she may show you the way.

Btw, I find this book interesting: "So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love" [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You/dp/14555091...

Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?

#69

Post by Buttons840 »

smitty1e wrote: post #46
hnlmorg wrote: post #28

Easier in some ways, harder in others. Easier: + You don't need to write a thousand edge case code to cover different devices + There's less "trial and error" trying to figure out what sequence of CSS properties is needed to adjust some of the simplest of designs + More choices of languages available (should Javascript / Typescript not float your boat) + More consistency in that you only need to worry about your back…

Back End owns more of the infrastructure, including the admin, pipeline, and networking chores. But the UX seems the 20% of the system eating 80% of the time, yes.

I was once doing good work at a dysfunctional company. We had a good application backend with a poor frontend. Another team, rivals, came in with a great frontend and barely enough backend to support it. They won so much support and mindshare with their prettier UI that our project was canceled, and they years working on backend features we had from the beginning.

To most people, the UI is the application.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-user-interface-is-the-appl...

Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?

#70

Post by nickd2001 »

zmmmmm wrote: post #51

I 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…

+1 to all this. :) Absolutely, learn the fundamentals. Also, detecting which tech is here to stay, and which is here today gone tomorrow, is itself a skill, that's essential for survival in this industry. Such a skill tends to come with age and experience (a.k.a getting burnt by working hard to learn something that's then discarded). The earlier this skill is developed the better. Then, one must be ruthless about quitting jobs, shunning higher pay or seniority, when that's necessary in order to keep working on stuff that maintains long-term skills. No good getting paid a fortune if 3 yrs later you're unemployable. I know someone that literally happened to, made a fortune as a contractor paid off his mortgage, then became a postman for a bit, eventually became an accountant as he saw that those skills would have long term value. (He couldn't stay in tech cos his skills were out of date.)
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