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"but there's no real technical challenge in front end stuff." oh boy, you are so wrong! as an old fart having spent a number of years building UIs, can tell yo

"but there's no real technical challenge in front end stuff." oh boy, you are so wrong! as an old fart having spent a number of years building UIs, can tell you, this is hard! information layout, controls, flow - it can be tangled into a total CF, or it can be seamless. you are not pasting libs on top of libs - that is the job of a monkey, front or back end alike. normal devs start their day with talking to end users and listening to their pain. then they spend rest of the day trying to alleviate it. monkeys spend their days thinking how they can add to user's pain by pasting more layers of crap. engineering is an important part in back end, front end or in cleaning the toilets. it is not what you do, it is how you do it.

EpicEng 10y ago
You're describing a task which is more frustrating than technically challenging. Nothing you described requires a high degree of intelligence or training, only time. Of course some are better than others at it, but that's true of anything. Think; designing the CV systems for self driving cars (since that's a hot topic at the moment) vs designing a UI which works seamlessly across browsers. One is a real, honest to God engineering challenge; the other is an exercise is patience and perseverance. There are many more people in this world who could pull off the latter than could the former. If you truly, honestly believe that UI dev work is technically difficult when measured against the rest of the engineering world then I can't imagine you've been solving hard problems throughout your career. UI layout is not "hard" and it's certainly not engineering, nor is 'cleaning toilets'. of course creating UI's comes with its own set of challenges, but I'm specifically talking about technical difficulty.
- shitgoose 10y ago
  by UI design I do not mean cross browser compatibility, but rather an understanding of the underlying data and operations on it, which involves familiarity with the business domain. this is hard. putting stuff on the screen is not hard. I am OK with tables and gifs. with all due respect your contempt for people who build UI (and clean the toilets) and misunderstanding or general principles of engineering are sad (pardon my microagression).
  - Chris2048 10y ago
    > putting stuff on the screen is not hard > your contempt for people who build UI You've carved out your own definition of Frontend dev, it doesn't always require business/domain knowledge, many just put stuff on the screen. Incidentally, I found this hard - not in a math problem way, but in a costing a lot of time and patience way. I distinctly recall spending a couple of hours trying to align some div after being requested to do so. I strongly dislike CSS.
- buzzybee 10y ago
  You can jump off the train and do bad UI at any moment. But UI always, always, gets hard when you start caring. That's not a measure of whether UI is harder than CV, it's a low-pass filter on what the market will value. Most of the individuals making CV demos are not making unfathomable genius-level demos: they are taking an existing library and bolting on a simple application to it. And most such demos are flimsy and not commercially viable, because the technology needs more massaging at a deeper level than the author is capable of in order to fulfill the desired marketing promise. Meanwhile, simple bolt-on UI tends to be good enough. Not because it's fine as-is, but because the user can accommodate for its brokenness without being able to express what exactly is wrong with it. The product can ship and create value, albeit not as much. Yet, a UI dev who wants the best possible experience has to have the same attention to detail up and down the stack as the CV dev who wants their algorithm to perform well along every metric. UI innovations are understated because they oft seem obvious or unsurprising in retrospect, but they do come along every so often, and often in tandem with the developments elsewhere - these days, AI algorithms are increasingly intertwined with the interface in a very direct fashion, when one considers voice processing, predictive text, or other such features. And yet, if you should aim to achieve better UI, some naysayer will come along and proclaim that you have made something "overengineered" and should "just use a standard toolkit like the rest of us."

EpicEng 10y ago

You're describing a task which is more frustrating than technically challenging. Nothing you described requires a high degree of intelligence or training, only time. Of course some are better than others at it, but that's true of anything. Think; designing the CV systems for self driving cars (since that's a hot topic at the moment) vs designing a UI which works seamlessly across browsers. One is a real, honest to God engineering challenge; the other is an exercise is patience and perseverance. There are many more people in this world who could pull off the latter than could the former. If you truly, honestly believe that UI dev work is technically difficult when measured against the rest of the engineering world then I can't imagine you've been solving hard problems throughout your career. UI layout is not "hard" and it's certainly not engineering, nor is 'cleaning toilets'. of course creating UI's comes with its own set of challenges, but I'm specifically talking about technical difficulty.

shitgoose 10y ago
by UI design I do not mean cross browser compatibility, but rather an understanding of the underlying data and operations on it, which involves familiarity with the business domain. this is hard. putting stuff on the screen is not hard. I am OK with tables and gifs. with all due respect your contempt for people who build UI (and clean the toilets) and misunderstanding or general principles of engineering are sad (pardon my microagression).
- Chris2048 10y ago
  > putting stuff on the screen is not hard > your contempt for people who build UI You've carved out your own definition of Frontend dev, it doesn't always require business/domain knowledge, many just put stuff on the screen. Incidentally, I found this hard - not in a math problem way, but in a costing a lot of time and patience way. I distinctly recall spending a couple of hours trying to align some div after being requested to do so. I strongly dislike CSS.
buzzybee 10y ago
You can jump off the train and do bad UI at any moment. But UI always, always, gets hard when you start caring. That's not a measure of whether UI is harder than CV, it's a low-pass filter on what the market will value. Most of the individuals making CV demos are not making unfathomable genius-level demos: they are taking an existing library and bolting on a simple application to it. And most such demos are flimsy and not commercially viable, because the technology needs more massaging at a deeper level than the author is capable of in order to fulfill the desired marketing promise. Meanwhile, simple bolt-on UI tends to be good enough. Not because it's fine as-is, but because the user can accommodate for its brokenness without being able to express what exactly is wrong with it. The product can ship and create value, albeit not as much. Yet, a UI dev who wants the best possible experience has to have the same attention to detail up and down the stack as the CV dev who wants their algorithm to perform well along every metric. UI innovations are understated because they oft seem obvious or unsurprising in retrospect, but they do come along every so often, and often in tandem with the developments elsewhere - these days, AI algorithms are increasingly intertwined with the interface in a very direct fashion, when one considers voice processing, predictive text, or other such features. And yet, if you should aim to achieve better UI, some naysayer will come along and proclaim that you have made something "overengineered" and should "just use a standard toolkit like the rest of us."