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

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

#71

Post by wink »

My experience is that in backend you spend 80% of your time on problems that are rightfully hard and 20% on bullshit.

In the frontend you spend 20% of your time on things that are hard because they need to and 80% on things that simply should be easier. This includes everything from browsers to desktop resolutions to needless churn in your framework.

I'm not saying one of them easier, especially in 2021 as I am a bit out of the picture in frontend but it seems it's the same type of problems in 2021 than it was 5/10/even 20 years ago.

In backend you choose your stack and who to interface with. Sure, people can write all sorts of clients to talk to you, but you are the one who decides most parameters (except amount of traffic, and for that there's rate limiting).

In frontend you are closest to the end user and are the only one who is not only speaking to machines, but that's only one end.

So personally I'd say frontend is more thankless, and you often need to know more about specific edge cases, whereas in backend you need to know more about unspecific classes of edge cases.

Also one point is that the barrier of frontend and backend has shifted. For a long time when we as backend developers worked with frontend developers that meant we did PHP/Python/Java/Ruby and some basic HTML and they did HTML/CSS/some JS.

Nowadays frontend basically means JavaScript and even the meaning of full stack has shifted.

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

#72

Post by neya »

If you had asked this question around 2007, I would have said front end is easier. But, as an experienced full stack solo consultant who runs production sites for his clients with millions of visitors, I can tell you backend is super easy in 2021 compared to frontend. I use Elixir/Phoenix framework.

Frontend has become this complex massive spaghetti mess of an ecosystem with something or the other constantly breaking all the time. almost all my projects involving frontend code has become extremely tedious to maintain because Babel has fucked up something or the old library that was supposed to do some simple function is kicked out of NPM or has renamed it’s package name to something without hyphens. You can’t even escape upgrading those libraries as your Webpack build will fail all of a sudden.

In contrast, I’ve switched to using Phoenix LiveView which has made me skip frontend development altogether (using JS frameworks like React, I mean) and my life has become so much easier.

My code is easier to reason about even after 6-8 months and stuff doesn’t break randomly.

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

#73

Post by caskstrength »

> I'm not good at animations, responsive layouts, pixel perfection, es6

> The simplest task now so complicated, many edge cases.

> Things get deprecated (or sunsetted) so fast.

> When I open the chrome inspector there's 10 new features which I ignore. It's too much.

I don't do web development at all, but from the outside it always seemed to me that most of those problems are completely self-inflicted by front end dev community that seems to be hellbent on turning even most trivial things into Rube Goldberg machines.

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

#74

Post by ochronus »

It's different. Complexity lies elsewhere. Transition is definitely possible, but, as always with stack changes, get ready to be in heavy learning mode again. At many places (I'd say the right ones, but I'm biased) when backend engs talk about ownership they mean end-to-end ownership, meaning undestanding how to run and operate their services, meaning you'd need to learn about infrastructure as well (the famous 'devops' thing, but don't get me started on terminology).

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

#75

Post by schwartzworld »

nickd2001 wrote: post #64

IMHO, back-end is a better long-term career investment, as it changes slower, less faddish, and you learn skills applicable to many situations. Its not easier, if anything actually harder, but more satisfying in my experience. I've noticed many early-to mid 20s devs love front-end, the new and shiny, it feels creative and "cool" to them. However, they can crash at age 30+ when those front-end skills aren't cool anymo…

> learned lots of back-end and dev-ops-y stuff, bash scripting , linux etc

I use shell scripts and Linux for front end every day. Modern frontend is quite programmatic.

> However, they can crash at age 30+ when those front-end skills aren't cool anymore

You've seen a lot of front enders age out of it? Why would this be? My whole team are frontenders in their 30s.

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

#76

Post by buro9 »

Both are hard but the shape of that hardness differs.

The frontend problemspace didn't feel like it was depth, more breadth... it's a constantly moving surface and lots of unreasonable demands were created (pixel perfect layouts being the most telling of them). However the number of things you really need to know are few and it's the tooling that changes often.

The backend problemspace is typically not as wide, but far deeper... the depth looks like still dark waters, they run very deep, you think it's smooth sailing but it's not. The tooling changes seldom and things are a lot more deterministic and within your control... but now you've exposed yourself to a lot of things you didn't previously have to be concerned about, the kernel, networking, memory allocations, distributed systems, algorithms, etc. The tools may remain the same for time spans of decades, but the depth means in your entire career you will not exhaust going deeper still.

Both are hard, but the shape of that differs.

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

#78

Post by schwartzworld »

sshine wrote: post #31

I made the move from pure back-end to full-stack some years ago. I find that backend paradigms tend to not evolve as quickly, so perhaps this pace suits you better. The consumer of a back-end is either a front-end under management, or via public APIs, and both usually live a lot longer than most JS frameworks and website designs. Still, if you don’t mind drawing things in browsers and just don’t like the pace of thin…

> you could pick a front-end framework designed to have a low rate of sudden changes, e.g. Elm.

React barely changes at all. The last major change was 3 years ago when they introduced hooks, which was not sudden. Even then they didn't deprecate the old way of doing things. You can write React today the same as you did in 2018 if you want.

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

#79

Post by albertopv »

ricardobeat wrote: post #55
valenterry wrote: post #32

No, 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 can, but only on new projects. I had to deal with codebases old up to 15 years, once on a project developed in java 3 and run on jvm 8.

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

#80

Post by spoiler »

valenterry wrote: post #59
ricardobeat wrote: post #55

Earlier 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…

I have the impression that your experience is mostly limited to creating new applications, from scratch up. But in reality, most backend-work is maintaining and extending existing backends and then things become much more difficult. And that's also why backend is different from frontend: it's easy to throw a frontend away and replace it with a new one - try to do that with a backend - usually much much harder.

> it's easy to throw a frontend away and replace it with a new one - try to do that with a backend - usually much much harder.

Untrue. I work at a company that's swapped out the frontend and then later the backend. I had to work on both of the projects because, and I can tell you without a any doubt in my mind that they were both equally challenging (for different reasons, but that's beyond the point).

In my experience frontend-only (or frontend-focues) devs tend to underestimate backend work, and the the backend devs are equally guilty of doing the same about frontend work. Everyone thinks they've got it the harderst. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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