As a backend developer I think it's easier than frontend, but at the same time my company can (over time) hire frontend developers, but good backend developers are basically impossible to hire, at least here in London.
Why so?
Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
111–120 of 179 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#112I believe it largely depends on the business domain. I worked for many years in fintech, for banks and insurances.
Consider the following examples. Insurance: Given 10 input fields about a potential customer, produce a quotation and an illustration for a life insurance policy. At the UI level you create a form or a set of pages to collect birthdate, gender, job, hobbies, smoker/non smoker and so on. At the back-end level the above reflects in countless queries against trivial decision tables, and a lot of business logic and maths to be applied for each year/month of the policy duration in order to create a projection of the insurace coverage, taxation and many many more. The front-end will eventually display a nice table with all the numbers.
Fintech, financial planning. Collect your client needs (buy a house in 10 years, buy a car in 5, pay college for kids), propose an investment plan that starts with some initial investments in specific investment products with monthly installments, add some occasional big investments, project investments growth over the years using different mathematical and statistical formulas, produce a numeric data series that the front-end will eventually use to draw a plot chart.
In both above examples front-end work is way less complex than back-end. Technology could also imply complexity: at the back-end you may have to learn Java, Spring, Database, RESTful, some queue API (Kafka), big data for reports (Hadoop, Spark) and so on. All this complexity is hidden to the front-end developer.
On the other hand, if you are building a blogging platform, probably the complexity is the same at the back-end and the front-end or is higher at the front-end.
So in my opinion there is no correct answer if you don't take into account the business domain. Having worked in fintech, insurance, document management, few more in my career, in all these domains in my experience back-end was more difficult or at least not easier than front-end. Especially if you work in a product company, and every implementation needs to be carefully designed to provide stable API, design for changes, security, code optimised for large numbers of users (hardly a problem in front-end since JS is running on each user's browser).
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#113No, Backend is not easier than Frontend. Both are equally hard, since you will always be pushed to get the most out of what is currently available in terms of technology & tooling, no matter of your niche. If not, your job will become worth less since you are going to be automated away at some point. A fallacy that I found many frontend-developers have is that they believe Backend is the same as Frontend, just that y…
Data / API / DB design will take 10%-20% of your time at most (unless you’re a DBA), maybe as low as 1% on a large company where almost everything you touch was made by someone else. In my experience (10+ years) backend is almost always faster when it comes to building apps. Not running your code on 300 different devices and OSs, or having to deal with 20 years of backwards compatibility is a big advantage. Plus the…
It depends. If the backend is done well, yes.
But how often is it the case that you're called to work on a well-designed back end?
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#114Your primary skill in any role should be distilling the simplicity from all the noise. Without that, frontend and backend will both be a disaster (though IME backend is significantly less ridiculous, it really depends on where you work).
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#115As a backend developer I think it's easier than frontend, but at the same time my company can (over time) hire frontend developers, but good backend developers are basically impossible to hire, at least here in London.
Why so?
It's a combination of:
* Less applicants for backend positions * The applicants we do have, for whatever reason don't pass interview at the rate frontend developers do * The backend devs that do pass interview, ask for too much money.
We know where the problems are, and that third point especially is causing our hiring manager no end of pain. But convincing our execs to significantly up the budget of the probably-already-most expensive department in the company is a tough sell.
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why so?
It's a combination of: * Less applicants for backend positions * The applicants we do have, for whatever reason don't pass interview at the rate frontend developers do * The backend devs that do pass interview, ask for too much money. We know where the problems are, and that third point especially is causing our hiring manager no end of pain. But convincing our execs to significantly up the budget of the probably-alr…
What do your interviews consist of for backend and for frontend devs?
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#117I don't feel it is easier or harder, just different.
Back-end coders will code in complex business logic that isn't appropriate for the front end. Algorithms and data structures become more important to your job. So does understanding which layer is the best place to solve a problem - understanding the power and strength of your API layer vs. your database layer vs. any other business layers you might have. You have to deal with the underlying architecture more - if you have a cluster of databases, their replication and conflict management can impact your data. You may have different languages to know for different pieces of the stack. There is also no lack of strongly held beliefs about how apps should be architected. And that doesn't even get into refactoring to handle major app changes, data changes, structure and data migrations.
All of that is still just doing the work - but it is neither inherently easier or harder. It all depends on where your strengths lie.
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#118If you remove all unnecessary complication, then front-end is probably easier in general. But, front-end is usually rife with complication.
I simply don't understand why there are 500 tools for everything and why FE jobs want you to know their specific stack as if it's impossible to get up to speed with if you already know JS.
Non-techs really emphasize specialists because they think it will save them money.
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data / API / DB design will take 10%-20% of your time at most (unless you’re a DBA), maybe as low as 1% on a large company where almost everything you touch was made by someone else. In my experience (10+ years) backend is almost always faster when it comes to building apps. Not running your code on 300 different devices and OSs, or having to deal with 20 years of backwards compatibility is a big advantage. Plus the…
Building an MVP backend is a lot easier, but there is no limit to how much work you can put into a backend to a typical app. Frontend is a pretty much solved problem, getting to that state takes longer than the backend MVP but after that there isn't that much more to do. Or do you think that reddit, twitter, facebook or google put more work into their frontends than everything that goes on in their backends? Recreati…
Found the backend dev.
Really, this is very dependent on the kind of software you work in and what the focus of that software is. There's a wide world of software out there, with all different kinds of priorities and challenges.
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#120Probably the part of the system where more of the business logic lives will be more difficult and interesting to develop. In modern projects, this probably starts in the front-end. These days, it is possible to develop quite a bit of business logic in the front-end, and it’s arguably delivered faster. In a mature project with significant scale, interesting parts of the business logic have to be implemented in the back-end.