Ask HN: Why did back-end development explode in complexity?

I did Java EE, Glassfish, JSF/IceFaces for my first job and at the same time I could have ftp'd a PHP/Perl script on a free host and called it a day (had I known better).

I think Devops has a played a huge role in why things have gotten more complicated. They want Kubernetes to be the solution to all problems. Heroku has fallen out of fashion for literally no reason. They won't even consider ElasticBeanstalk or App runner for even the smallest of projects. Companies would rather hire a 200k plus benefits person instead of paying a few hundred dollars more a month on hosted solutions. I've honestly never seen anything like it.

Try Frontend development!

BE is simultaneously easier than ever and harder than ever. The "new" complexity in the BE is stuff that has always been there. However, in the past, the infrastructure required so much manual work that it was handled completely independently from the BE.

Now, I can write a BE, configure a Dockerfile, and deploy to a server nearly anywhere in the world without leaving my chair.

I don't think it has. We just have a fashion trend where people love to brag about managing 100 micro-services using Kubernetes. But there's still companies out there where the entire back-end is a single binary on a single beefy server, potentially with a hot spare server running alongside it.

The scope of back-end development has grown considerably. In fact, it's precisely "one level of indirection" bigger: "commit is the new save", "push is the new commit", and "repo is the new module". Plus, "full-stack development" now includes containers and orchestration! Which is, of course, insane: distributed systems are, in general, not well understood. Expecting people to understand front-end, back-end, and then just tacking on an academically challenging area is beyond foolish.

I strongly believe that we're now at the limit of human cognitive ability (as evidenced by the tight, and tightening, employment market) and we human programmers are painting ourselves into a complexity corner and we will weep when our employers happily hire the only minds capable of dealing with mechanical complexity, artificial ones.