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

I've been a "front end" guy since 2007. The pool of jobs I can fit gets smaller every year because I'm not a very good modern front end guy.

I'm not good at animations, responsive layouts, pixel perfection, es6

The simplest task now so complicated, many edge cases.

Things get deprecated (or sunsetted) so fast.

When I open the chrome inspector there's 10 new features which I ignore. It's too much.

I spend so much time googling obscure npm error to fix my local dev environment with each OS or package update.

I lost confidence to apply for jobs because I don't have the will to study the things they will test me for.

Has anyone made that move from front to back, do you feel it's easier?

I personally found CSS harder to learn than backend (retrieving things from DB, adding few lines to expose it as API). Putting things in certain places on the browser screen is still tough for me.

It's not easier, just a very different environment to work with, it all depends on the technology choice to be honest.

I've worked for some larger-ish tech companies the past 6 years and the choice for backend technologies is simply more mature than the hodge-podge of changes in the frontend, there has been some consolidation on backend frameworks/technologies/patterns over the past decade that has helped me a lot.

I think you can say that backend engineering with some technologies is much more mature than the current environment on the web frontend. Not easier, just that you don't have to care about swapping major parts of your build infrastructure every 3 years anymore.

try to focus on the things you are good at and enjoy doing. It seems that you don’t enjoy the more design side of things (animations, layout, pixel perfect) and perhaps nor the infra part (setting up es6 libs), but what do you enjoy? Do you like the actual code part? The more core javascript bits, building business logic? Then standard backend might be a fit for you, if not, there is still much more areas you can go to, share with us what you enjoy doing

As a front-ender I also have this feeling. The key to overcome this feeling of being overwhelmed is to specialize.

Some people like building whole thing from scratch and gluing a bazillion of technologies, but this is not for me. I prefer to own a small area and specialize in it.

There's many sub-specializations in front-end that are not about UX/tweaking UI/animations/architecture/mashing up libs: internationalization; performance; accessibility; build and deployment; security etc.

Those specialized jobs happen mostly in bigger companies though, small companies simply don't have that much resources and prefer do-all people. And of course doing a specialized thing for too long can wear you too.