I would guess at least 50% of jobs are working on some internal facing app at a large boring company. You don't need to do animations, or pixel perfect layouts for most of those. Most places don't need responsive layouts, but they aren't that bad. Es6 is for the most part a big step up. Meh idk, this seems like perfectionism. If you want to be a great frontend developer you need those, but most people are average and many are below average. They are still getting jobs.
Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
161–170 of 179 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If the tools you learned in your twenties age out of relevance If someone learned React in your 20s and then "aged out", they must have been an early adopter. React is only 9 years old and most developers didn't start learning it in 2013. And it's far from irrelevant: https://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/React > "Modern" web frontend work involves a lot of chasing after new tooling, frameworks, and libraries. Le…
Yes, if you learned React you'd have a decent shelf life still. What if you learned classic AngularJS, due to go unsupported in a month and a half? What if you threw in with ExtJS ages ago and the enterprise corp you've been using it for just downsized and outsourced your project? Maybe you were an EmberJS aficionado but can't find new gigs using it. I worked on a greenfield project in Backbone/Thorax/Mustache a numb…
Skills transfer across frameworks and even languages. If you're good at Elm or Clojure, you would be great at React. Vue owes a lot of its structure to the original Angular (or at least it did when I learned it forever ago).
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Modern" web frontend work involves a lot of chasing after new tooling, frameworks, and libraries. In your thirties, you're more likely to have a stable relationship and kids to care for. If the tools you learned in your twenties age out of relevance, then you may well have a hard time retraining to new tools while raising small kids.
> If the tools you learned in your twenties age out of relevance If someone learned React in your 20s and then "aged out", they must have been an early adopter. React is only 9 years old and most developers didn't start learning it in 2013. And it's far from irrelevant: https://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/React > "Modern" web frontend work involves a lot of chasing after new tooling, frameworks, and libraries. Le…
Aside from what NateEag said, React is one thing, but the tooling is a completely different topic. When it comes to building your frontend, there was grunt and gulp (that I'm aware of), now the tools that get most love are I think webpack and esbuild. I didn't do anything with esbuild yet, but the way that applications are built changed a lot during the years, and webpack is much different that whatever there was before.
Also, all of those tools are massive pains in your ass if something breaks, because debugging what actually broke is hard when your build process becomes more complicated.
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#164IMO the frontend is easier to understand and develop but really really hard to deliver, as compared to backend. Reason being multiple form factors, viewports and platforms to consider and the ever changing frameworks. People end up working on the same problem again and again from a different perspective which gets frustrating really fast.
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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. That is included in what I said, many projects are fine with an MVP, that is why it is called MVP. If your frontend is a game or some creator tool like photoshop then they will be complicated, but usually you don…
This might sound shocking, but there is a lot going on behind the scenes at Facebook, Google, and any big player really, on the frontend. Like, a lot. Think a thousand A/B tests at once. Hundreds of independent products and internal tools. Each one with dozens of minor, but necessary pages that most users will never see. Facebook’s frontend passed 10 million lines of code back in 2013. Someone wrote all of that. Yes, we did that to ourselves…
Most product teams for these companies have more frontend than backend devs. They’re building new features, sometimes multiple versions in parallel, fixing bugs and creating more of them, running experiments, and with modern frameworks, a whole lot of plumbing. You can basically generate infinite amounts of product work, and that’s what companies do.
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 Disagreed. Maybe in large companies that work at huge scales, but below that there's plenty of business value that can be delivered with what is essentially CRUD and there's still money to be made. I'd say that if anything, the $$$ per unit of effort is much higher working for small…
> Disagreed. Maybe in large companies that work at huge scales, but below that there's plenty of business value that can be delivered with what is essentially CRUD and there's still money to be made. But that's exactly what I'm saying! Just continue the thought: if CRUD is so easy, but money can be made then it will be automated away by frameworks or even commercial products. So less people will be needed and hence p…
Well, 80% of my job is CRUD. But the 20% remaining is custom logic attached to some objects being modified. That’s where the money is made and what prevents it from being automated away entirely.
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Disagreed. Maybe in large companies that work at huge scales, but below that there's plenty of business value that can be delivered with what is essentially CRUD and there's still money to be made. But that's exactly what I'm saying! Just continue the thought: if CRUD is so easy, but money can be made then it will be automated away by frameworks or even commercial products. So less people will be needed and hence p…
CRUD is 'wierdly hard', in that 15 years ago, it was very easy to make a windows CRUD app in Visual Basic 6. An unskilled person could build such functionality at the same or faster speed than a quite skilled web developer. Modern web appears to have made the simple hard. Where you could once just draw a GUI (a responsive GUI), now you need to know CSS, and a simple multi column layout in CSS is something that takes…
To be fair, you can still make a VB6 (or ) app.
The problem is that for legitimate reasons, most of the processing no longer happens on the client device, so there’s suddenly a lot more complexity.
Making a desktop app that owns its data and is its the sole user is still easy. But most business requirements nowadays want a consumer product where people can interact with a subset of the data with a web UI or mobile app. That’s where the complexity comes in compared to VB6.
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 Disagreed. Maybe in large companies that work at huge scales, but below that there's plenty of business value that can be delivered with what is essentially CRUD and there's still money to be made. I'd say that if anything, the $$$ per unit of effort is much higher working for small…
> the frontend world is always changing and you're often pushing the limits in what's possible What limits are there in the frontend world? Modern frontends could run on hardware from 20 years ago unless you are talking about games. Libraries and clients change etc, but the problems you can solve using them doesn't. 20 years ago you had to build your frontend as a desktop app if it did complex things, 10 years ago yo…
> What limits are there in the frontend world?
Like making that new scroll hijacking feature that a marketing guy saw on Apple’s website work on IE11 or something.
Again, none of these features are essential, but from the business perspective they are still requirements.
In comparison, most of what you’d do on the backend is a solved problem and there’s existing reliable & battle-tested tooling such as frameworks and relational databases that you can offload the hard work to.
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#169Yes. Backend dev is “clean” relatively speaking, which is why most devs prefer it. Frontend you will always be dealing with someone else’s obscure framework.
Re: Ask HN: Is back end dev generally easier than front end?
#170Depends. If backend = writing controllers, some basic db interactions (querying, storing), and more or less writing modular code then I would say it's just like frontend. On the other side if backend also includes: handling more complex db interactions (your simple query does not work performant enough anymore when your table has more than N rows), sync/async communication between multiple services, splitting monolithic applications into decoupled services, going beyond the basic of SOLID, handle critical backend stuff like payments, checkouts... then I think backend is more difficult than frontend.