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Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?

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21–30 of 41 posts

Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?

#21
Terrible idea. Stay away from that.

Everything is changing every year, pushed by young people who have no clue what they are doing and don't care about hours and work conditions.

Meanwhile, companies exploit them as much as they can to make new products and get all the returns of their work.

You have access to a much broader set of jobs with Java and Scala.

Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?

#22
post #17

I ended up on a frontend project recently and I am doing my best to get out of it. Its a nightmare. Imagine a scripting language that you have to compile into another scripting language. Lessons from decades of shared experience completely ignored, terrible IDE support, framework descriptions that are more snakeoil than technical documentation, the worst dependency hell there is with minor updates breaking APIs, and…

That's a pretty silly opinion. The fact is that writing interface code is actually hard, and it tends to have many moving parts that are hard to fit into any abstraction. Have you tried writing, say, iOS interface code? It's a bloated monstrosity, although autocomplete is a tiny bit better. There's a reason that so many companies ship electron and react native based apps, even though they have worse performance. It sounds like you've gotten into a field that you always held a misplaced disdain for, you've discovered that it was harder than you thought, and now you are blaming your tools.

Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?

#23
post #15
post #12

With the rise of single page applications there is immense demand for the rigor and form that seasoned back-end developers can bring to front-end teams. Immense state trees, webworkers, asynchronous changes, tiered caching, pre-emptive fetching, modularization, optimistic rendering, validation, behavioral analytics, testing and more. This is all without even getting started on actual presentational aspects. The pace…

You should take the advice of this comment. The reason there are many moving parts is that the space is retooling to push the limits of what is possible. If you enjoy learning and solving problems, it's great.

They hardly make anything that was not already possible with PHP and its tooling 10 years ago.

Well, maybe there is more animations, more tracking and slower initial page loads.

Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?

#24
post #17

I ended up on a frontend project recently and I am doing my best to get out of it. Its a nightmare. Imagine a scripting language that you have to compile into another scripting language. Lessons from decades of shared experience completely ignored, terrible IDE support, framework descriptions that are more snakeoil than technical documentation, the worst dependency hell there is with minor updates breaking APIs, and…

I just looked into Angular4. the command (ng new new-app, yes it has its own cli). creates a tree with the following: 3098 directories, 21504 files everything it does is printing "app works!" well to be fair to angular4, the problem here is the cargo cult of js/ts and to get a full experience they just pack everything (which you might need) together.

Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?

#25
post #22
post #17

I ended up on a frontend project recently and I am doing my best to get out of it. Its a nightmare. Imagine a scripting language that you have to compile into another scripting language. Lessons from decades of shared experience completely ignored, terrible IDE support, framework descriptions that are more snakeoil than technical documentation, the worst dependency hell there is with minor updates breaking APIs, and…

That's a pretty silly opinion. The fact is that writing interface code is actually hard, and it tends to have many moving parts that are hard to fit into any abstraction. Have you tried writing, say, iOS interface code? It's a bloated monstrosity, although autocomplete is a tiny bit better. There's a reason that so many companies ship electron and react native based apps, even though they have worse performance. It s…

"Hard" or just frustrating? I have found the latter to be true. You're not solving difficult technical problems; you're fighting your tools and figuring out the quirks of the hundreds of abstractions and third party libraries you rely upon to make widgets do their thing.

Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?

#26
post #22
post #17

I ended up on a frontend project recently and I am doing my best to get out of it. Its a nightmare. Imagine a scripting language that you have to compile into another scripting language. Lessons from decades of shared experience completely ignored, terrible IDE support, framework descriptions that are more snakeoil than technical documentation, the worst dependency hell there is with minor updates breaking APIs, and…

That's a pretty silly opinion. The fact is that writing interface code is actually hard, and it tends to have many moving parts that are hard to fit into any abstraction. Have you tried writing, say, iOS interface code? It's a bloated monstrosity, although autocomplete is a tiny bit better. There's a reason that so many companies ship electron and react native based apps, even though they have worse performance. It s…

The reason is that they can hire from a massive pool of developers and target Mac, Windows, and Linux all with a single application and UX.

I always found writing Cocoa-based code to be surprisingly elegant. The only thing that ever felt weird was having to switch back and forth between Project Builder and Interface Builder.

In any case, there are a lot of things that are hard to build and also have great, coherent sets of tools to build them. Erlang comes to mind.

Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?

#27
post #22
post #17

I ended up on a frontend project recently and I am doing my best to get out of it. Its a nightmare. Imagine a scripting language that you have to compile into another scripting language. Lessons from decades of shared experience completely ignored, terrible IDE support, framework descriptions that are more snakeoil than technical documentation, the worst dependency hell there is with minor updates breaking APIs, and…

That's a pretty silly opinion. The fact is that writing interface code is actually hard, and it tends to have many moving parts that are hard to fit into any abstraction. Have you tried writing, say, iOS interface code? It's a bloated monstrosity, although autocomplete is a tiny bit better. There's a reason that so many companies ship electron and react native based apps, even though they have worse performance. It s…

I've written frontend apps in C++ with Qt. Please don't take my hate of frontend Javascript personally -- I really do hate it though.

It sounds like that you have not much experience outside of Javascript and somehow think that what I see as a massive mess is somehow acceptable in 2017. It really isn't.

Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?

#28

Sure, it's also what we call a fullstack developer ;)

+1 to this.

Where I am from "Front End" is still seen by HR as the guy who slices PSD templates into HTML layouts and they pay accordingly.

Calling yourself front end is doing yourself a disservice especially since you have all those years of experience in back end.

Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?

#29
post #25
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty silly opinion. The fact is that writing interface code is actually hard, and it tends to have many moving parts that are hard to fit into any abstraction. Have you tried writing, say, iOS interface code? It's a bloated monstrosity, although autocomplete is a tiny bit better. There's a reason that so many companies ship electron and react native based apps, even though they have worse performance. It s…

"Hard" or just frustrating? I have found the latter to be true. You're not solving difficult technical problems; you're fighting your tools and figuring out the quirks of the hundreds of abstractions and third party libraries you rely upon to make widgets do their thing.

Hard isn't the right word. Unnecessarily complex is more accurate.

What I've seen in js mirrors a lot of what I saw in php 10 years ago. JS is now the easy language to get into, and so it has the most inexperienced devs with the least access to greybeards to at least show them what to avoid. The result is people who don't quite realize how insane the whole toolchain is. I've got a setup at work that makes make seem like a friendly dev requirement.

Re: Ask HN: Moving to Front End Engineering after 10 years in back end, worth it?

#30
If you have 10 years of experience and still think of yourself as "a backend guy", you're doing something massively wrong.

No offense. Your skills should be applicable across the board. You either have a confidence issue or haven't developed skills that are in line with your experience.

There's no reason for you to not be able to " move to front-end ", although I don't get why anyone would want to do that. It's an undocumented mess, dominated by hipsterish framework cults.

This is going to be offensive to the front-end crowd, but if you need a new framework every other month, at some point you have to realise that the underlying technology is garbage and needs to be replaced.

I've gone through the react tutorial multiple times and I still don't get it. I don't get how to build it (webpack info npm or whatever), I don't get how to do things because there is no documentation. And that's not because im slow. Yesterday I picked up ethereum from scratch, evaluated three of their languages and deployed my first smart contract on a 4 hour train ride. And ethereum isn't exactly well documented either.

But try googling react api and enjoy the non-results. Impossible to understand unless you're part of the cult. Requires full immersion. Front-end seems to have gone full retard and citizens of the internet know to never go full retard.

Nothing compares to the mess that is front-end development.

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