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

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

#31

Post by bobbytherobot »

Is it worth it?

From a financial standpoint, it depends. The range that is front-end covers a vast range of talent. A person could be labeled front-end while theming WordPress websites, while another person is also front-end working on a large product where engineering practices are important. In that range, the pay is going to greatly vary: $30k - $250k.

From an enjoyment standpoint, it too depends. If you enjoy solving user facing problems, then front-end is your thing. It isn't just about how to you retrieve the data, but how does the user interact with querying and then reading the results.

The front-end landscape does appear scary, but you need to realize that you are seeing a much wider landscape than you are with Scala and Ruby. Compare the front-end landscape to the data storage landscape. You got MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, Redis, Mongo, Solr, Active Record, Datamapper, Hadoop, etc. If you tried to master all of it and follow every new library that came out, you would go mad. So you focus on a certain area while occasionally looking around. Do the same thing for front-end. Do you want to be working on large-scale applications, then focus on things like React and TypeScript - things meant to solve large-scale issues. If you want to make brochure websites, then focus on jQuery and CSS.

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

#33

Post by ice109 »

wayn3 wrote: post #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 un…

I have no clue what you're talking about re docs - i went from zero front-end experience to having a working spa with router and redux and material components in like 2 weeks after going through the react training tut and abramov's redux videos on egghead - maybe you're the one that's not good as you think. people dramatically exaggerate how "messy" the react ecosystem is. you can figure everything out by using chrome dev tools with the react and redux extensions and a little chatting on #reactjs. but whatever more full stack jobs for me I guess.

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

#34

Post by wayn3 »

ice109 wrote: post #33
wayn3 wrote: post #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 un…

I have no clue what you're talking about re docs - i went from zero front-end experience to having a working spa with router and redux and material components in like 2 weeks after going through the react training tut and abramov's redux videos on egghead - maybe you're the one that's not good as you think. people dramatically exaggerate how "messy" the react ecosystem is. you can figure everything out by using chrom…

you needed

- the react training

- abramovs redux videos on egghead

- chrome dev tools

- chrome react extension

- chrome redux extension

- a chatroom full of experts

that kind of confirms that the docs suck.

i'm not competing for "full stack" jobs. enjoy 'em.

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

#35

Post by ionised »

I'm a back-end Java/Scala dev too with a bit of experience in front-end tech (mostly for our internal data management web app) and honestly, I find front-end stuff awfully tedious and messy.

It seems to me to be a spaghetti nightmare of brittle frameworks build on top of a teetering stack of already brittle frameworks and badly designed languages (looking at you JS), made worse by the almost hipster-esque obsession with jumping on new frameworks every 6 months that seem to offer nothing but a reinvention of the wheel.

And don't get me started on Electron.

From my own personal experience I think learning a bit of front-end stuff is valuable, but I'd stick to being primarily a middle/back-end developer. That's where all the interesting stuff happens anyway.

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

#36

Post by ionised »

woah wrote: post #22
papaf wrote: 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…

> 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.

I've written interfaces in Java, C# and Python applications and they were not at all difficult. The hardest part is the business logic behind the GUI, not the GUI itself.

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

#37

Post by egfx »

frigg wrote: post #13

From my very limited view in my opinion it's not worth it. There is an abundance of new frameworks and libraries and everybody wants to go for the "new cool thing". Things break a lot, things change fast and you need to always learn new stuff which are not necessarily better. It seem annoying and overkill to keep up with everything in the front-end world. Plus, there are no interesting problems to solve there.

"Plus, there are no interesting problems to solve there."

This is laughable and short sighted.

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

#38

Post by ud0 »

The demand for skilled Front-end engineers have gone up. Looking at the responses from this post you can see that a lot of back-end engineers find it hard to tame the beast that is Javascript & this mis-understanding has slowly turned to hate. Thus while they run away from it, this leaves an large opening. Let's face it the bulk of services we use now live on the web and Front-end is going to be around for a long time. Someone has to take on this task, this is why over the years I've personally seen front-end engineers earn the same as back-end engineers I don't have the statistics but I know folks personally. As people run away from JS this creates a demand for front-end heroes willing to take on the ever changing landscape turbulent but necessary. For crying out loud you are reading this comment on a page.

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

#39

Post by swah »

papaf wrote: 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…

After completing a tiny project in VueJS+Bulma where I was not 100% happy with what I'm delivering, I was playing with Google Cloud Platform "console", and oh boy, do they get their interactions right.

Every little component to do a new configuration is compact, clear, cute, and intuitive. They seem to think about minimizing mouse movement all the time.

I feel like starting my project from zero and copying a dozen solutions from Google. (But they would be painful to replicate, so no..)

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

#40

Post by _Tev »

wayn3 wrote: post #34
ice109 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no clue what you're talking about re docs - i went from zero front-end experience to having a working spa with router and redux and material components in like 2 weeks after going through the react training tut and abramov's redux videos on egghead - maybe you're the one that's not good as you think. people dramatically exaggerate how "messy" the react ecosystem is. you can figure everything out by using chrom…

you needed - the react training - abramovs redux videos on egghead - chrome dev tools - chrome react extension - chrome redux extension - a chatroom full of experts that kind of confirms that the docs suck. i'm not competing for "full stack" jobs. enjoy 'em.

Gosh, you sound like there's nothing to learn on backend.

Seriously, maybe more humility will help you improve. Frontend is super easy to learn for beginners (anecdotal evidence of me and like 4 other friends/guys I know). And MDN is vastly superior to e.g. python docs I've encountered so far, or heard/seen from my python friends.

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