It is almost as if complexity is increasing regardless of the software field one is in. Maybe it's due to the fact that engineers exist to build complexity, stacking layers is what we do day to day.
Ask HN: Why did back-end development explode in complexity?
41–50 of 78 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did back-end development explode in complexity?
#42The two biggest wrenches that get thrown into a backend system and blow up complexity in my experience:
- 100x in growth, aka scaling.
- Needing to set up reporting data pipelines. Metrics, auditing, 3rd party uses.
Does the frontend need to worry about either of these? Maybe for scaling, they need to do some CDN work, or is that still the backend developer's job?
Re: Ask HN: Why did back-end development explode in complexity?
#43The 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…
Is the employment market really tight?
Re: Ask HN: Why did back-end development explode in complexity?
#44To respond to OP's edit: frontend catches more shit because it's largely gotten worse at the same time as getting more complex. This isn't (only) outsiders looking in leveling that criticism—it's people who worked on GUI software in the 90s looking at the state of things and wondering why it's both constantly changing and, in many ways, worse than it was back then. Slower, worse tools producing slower, worse software…
> frontend catches more shit because it's largely gotten worse at the same time as getting more complex.
The "microservices by fad" based architecture usually comes with a huge decrease in performance and an even large one in reliability. The NoSQL for no reason fad came with horrible performance and some very bad data losses. Every once in a while we get some data leakage story here, certainly many are due to complexity (but nobody can tell which ones).
Frontend is not alone suffering for the complexity.
Re: Ask HN: Why did back-end development explode in complexity?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have never met a full-stack developer that is comfortable with the full stack. I am also pretty sure full-stack was coined by recruiters and marketing folks to create a technical middle class.
I dont even have a clue what a full-stack even means these days, its just a resume wank-word somewhere between "cloud" and "framework"
"Full stack developer" is supposed to mean someone who will just figure shit out irrespective of where the bug/enhancement resides.
I say this, half tongue-in-cheek.
Re: Ask HN: Why did back-end development explode in complexity?
#46Oh you sweet child, you haven't seen complexity until you have deployed J2EE services generated using WSDL, running in an OSGi container, interfaced with EJBs packaged using Ant and deployed into GlassFish, integrated with IIS running on a Windows Server. Try finding a starter kit for that.
Hum... I've done this, and no, the "multiple interdependent microservices" over kubernetes architecture is much worse.
Re: Ask HN: Why did back-end development explode in complexity?
#47Oh you sweet child, you haven't seen complexity until you have deployed J2EE services generated using WSDL, running in an OSGi container, interfaced with EJBs packaged using Ant and deployed into GlassFish, integrated with IIS running on a Windows Server. Try finding a starter kit for that.
No mention of CORBA? I think it is on the top of my personal "what the heck is going on there and why on Earth anybody would want it to happen to them?" list.
I used CORBA once about 20 years ago to talk between a C++ server and a Java EJB server. It was pretty ok? It beat hand wiring TCP protocols. I'm not sure hand-wiring REST calls is much better. At least we have gRPC now.
Re: Ask HN: Why did back-end development explode in complexity?
#48Oh you sweet child, you haven't seen complexity until you have deployed J2EE services generated using WSDL, running in an OSGi container, interfaced with EJBs packaged using Ant and deployed into GlassFish, integrated with IIS running on a Windows Server. Try finding a starter kit for that.
The frontend answer to complexity had to do with young/new devs fomo’ing into resume driven development and augmenting their growing identity/ego as a developer. But this Java shit, that has to all come from enterprise solutions right? I can’t imagine there were tons of influencer-like blog posts that JavaScript had. What hell hole did those Java ideas even come from? Blah. One way or another, people manage to fuck e…
15-25 years ago, there were hip-for-the-time tech influencer bloggers who would write all sorts of stuff about whatever new frameworks and tech were available in the Java world.
If you take all the scary Java Enterprise buzzwords in one of the previous posts on this thread, and look them up, you'll find that they all came about, roughly, between 1999 and 2007.
I don't fully remember what all the hip influencer tech blogs were during that era (I recall "Joel on Software" having been important), but I do remember that people who paid more attention to such things were really into "Enterprise Java Beans" at the time.
So the JVM world might suffer from a bit of an analogous problem. But that world's complexity explosion was decades ago.
My feeling is that backend has always been complex, depending on the scale you were trying to operate at (and how much scale your framework and ecosystem forced you to think about whether you wanted to or not). The best you can do to mitigate it is continually ask "Do I really need my backend to handle the scale I'm designing it for?" and "Is all of the complexity in my preferred stack still necessary, or can some of it be hidden/automated?"
Re: Ask HN: Why did back-end development explode in complexity?
#49I really don't think this is a productive question or will produce productive answers that aren't tribal and arbitrary. Some folks will blame "the system" or "the man", others will claim it's not hard and you just need to RTFM, still others will explain how much harder it was "back in their day", and some folks will question the question (like me). But nobody is going to drop some single piece of information or knowl…
Lovely answer, should be cross posted to the frontend thread :)
I see your edit, fair enough!
I tend to agree with you; stuff that felt impossible for me to understand at one point is now second nature to me, and over time I've learned how to do more. UI and BE, as well as orchestration and infra.
AWS used to scared me, and now I maintain a dozen microservices (and I may slightly regret breaking everything up lmao) for my startup in AWS by myself because Terraform is pretty easy to pick up and at this point AWS makes a lot of sense (hello Dunning-Kruger, my oldest colleague).
Frontend terrified me because I didn't know how to compose UI cleanly (not just JS), but then I learned React and now feel confident I can build, maintain, and deploy complex frontends because honestly it wasn't that hard to grok.
The single strongest piece of advice I've been given, the single idea that gets me through like... 99% of work related strife is this:
How you feel now is not permanent and will not last forever.
I guess the more poetic way people say this is, "This too shall pass"[0] but I just think of Gandalf so...
Re: Ask HN: Why did back-end development explode in complexity?
#50Because development jobs pays too damn well, and are too easy to get. Someone famous once said something along the lines of "any idiot can make a thing more complicated, more complex, but it takes the stroke of genius to go in the opposite direction"
Basically, backend dev is so complicated because it's done by fools. When it's not done by fools, it's either not complex or has some very difficult requirements, perhaps sometimes both.
Edit to add, I say this as a foolish backend Dev myself, no offence meant to my own kin, of course!