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

I'm a full-stack engineer, but my main focus has always been frontend, so to give my perspective.

Frontend is really hard, writing re-usable HTML and CSS is almost as hard as writing re-usable backend modules. I get annoyed by backend engineers brushing off frontend, as it's a piece of cake for them. But when you actually ask them to write some, they struggle, because they have no idea how to make it reusable.

Frontend especially requires you to stay up-to-date, even more so than backend technologies. The ecosystem changes so much, that it can become an annoyance, but the key is to stick to what you think is best. For example, I still use Gulp for tasks, just because it works, and it's far easier to configure than Webpack or any other bundler.

But on the backend, I've found that there are far more interesting problems to solve. The design behind it is far more complex, especially when you start dealing with databases and message queues. But then you also need to start looking at how to deploy your backend, and how to scale it up, etc...

So when I made the move from frontend to backend, it wasn't easy. But it also wasn't particularly hard, if you know JS/TS, moving to a node backend is fairly straight forward. Once you have enough experience there, moving to Java or Python is just learning whatever framework you're using. What I found much more difficult, was moving back to frontend, after doing backend for a couple of months, I felt like many things had changed, and it was hard to switch my mindset back to frontend.

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 control :drools:).

I find it easier anyway, mostly because I can write most code (for a specific endpoint) in my head and when I type it in, it works. With frontend, not so much. And with the visual feedback trial and error loop that frontend often ends up in, I often would not call it programming at all.

The annoying things (to me) about frontend are of course apples and pears; architecting for frontend, writing logic and fetching data is comparable with backend dev and similarly straightforward imho. While we are all fullstack, we have a few seniors who do 90% frontend and a few 90% backend; the 10% overlap that backend spends on frontend is writing logic and data fetching: after that it moves to frontend to do the rest.

Front-end is awful in (large) part because of the tooling IMO. In the backend world, you need to make sure your _vertical_ (aka scale) is respected. It's a matter of your code, your infra plus the tooling to help you. If you're good at what you do, use the correct engineering approaches to have an efficient program and use up to date infrastructure or platforms, and use an up to date language (Rust, Python, Java is excellent here, whatever) you'll have all the tools. Your ground won't move as long as you didn't ask him to move. So, For me, it's easier to maintain (but still requires a loooot of care and attention to not fall apart)

In the frontend world, as you said, it's movement everywhere. Browsers, JS, JS package managers, CSS and so on. Even if your code don't move, the platform under will. Your code performance is not only dependent of you, making you tied to the evolution if you want to be up to date. That's so hard, and ungrateful...

If you want to stay in the frontend world, you should definitely increase your knowledge in CSS + Responsive, I think it's the best skill. In JS, stay on par with the language spec. Libraries will come and go, you can learn one (Vue or React, whatever it's the same) to understand the foundations, and it can land you a job basically everywhere.

Backend is easier because it's vertically aligned: performance and stability on a given system that you own. Frontend is horizontally aligned: acceptable performance and rendering on a shitload of systems which enslave you.

What interested me those last months is another path: Mobile dev, especially with Flutter. You keep some stability of a fixed OS (you still have the different versions + screen size, but you choose which one to support), and have the tooling of something close to the backend (compiled languages, package manager, big community). I think you should take a look there if you still want to keep a feet in "client" software, plus you'll never get out of job offers!

Personally, I do find back-end easier to reason about than FE, although it will almost certainly depend on your choice of language/framework to a greater or lesser extent.

In C# MVC (Or PHP MVC like Yii which is very similar), you have a very clear separation of what is what. A single action is where most functionality will sit or be called from. A view is where most front-end code sits (and if writing APIs, this is largely not relevant). Models are for the most part just data properties, perhaps with atributes for validation. Debugging it for the complicated cases is still very easy.

My experience in front-end is that debugging is very difficult. It is not easy to follow the path of execution, partly because of the large complexity of libraries/web-packing type stuff and partly probably depends on the tools you use. You have to consider a LOT of state in anything other than easy applications. I guess these might get better over time as people learn what works and what really doesn't but most of the larger FE frameworks have all had large changes to their patterns/opinions in a relatively short space of time.

I also don't why but I find C# much easier to read and understand than JS even though JS is based on the same syntax style. Again, might be the tooling, coding style or just the complexity of things like Vue classes but I can't easily review JS (or TS) code whereas I can spot mistakes in C# from miles away.

Like other have said though ymmv and whatever you do, you always need to keep up, keep learning and believe in yourself.