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The few backend devs I've talked to have agreed that the world spins a bit slower in the back-end side of things, without having weekly "chapter meetings" to di

The few backend devs I've talked to have agreed that the world spins a bit slower in the back-end side of things, without having weekly "chapter meetings" to discuss how the code we wrote last week is now obsolete. Backend devs are also much more versed in writing decent, performant code, to my experience - whereas the majority of front-end devs I've worked with have no idea why you should try to avoid writing loops in loops. But of course, everything can be bad, and it also varies from org to org, so here's to hoping my first back-end role won't suck because otherwise I'd be pretty sad.

kreeben 6y ago
When React and Angular became popular I realized with great sadness that I was no longer a full stack dev and that I would never ever be one again. There's a whole group of us at work. The young devs laugh at our front-end abilities but they also look up to us because of our ability to elegantly hide our loops within loops within loops, with Linq. I haven't seen a performant LOB app in years.
nicbou 6y ago
My last frontend job was a few years ago, but I'm still writing VueJS apps the same way I used to. I don't feel like anything has really changed since then. I just got better at using the same tools. The only meaningful change from my perspective is that browsers can do more things. Backend is nice because you have greater control over the environment, and because testing data flows is easier than testing user interfaces. However, I was not a big fan of devops and cloud stuff, which felt too abstract to me.
codr7 6y ago
Slower perhaps, but it has definitely accumulated its share of complexity and ceremony along the way. Much of it is basic CRUD, built on top of a tower of complexity, crammed into a container and served by whatever cloud provider. I spend most of my time plugging and praying/crying.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  My work feels like 5% analysis, 5% writing algorithms, 20% writing boilerplate code, 70% integration with some complex ill-documented monstrosity and debugging.
yen223 6y ago
The Kubernetes ecosystem is proof that backend engineers are perfectly capable of overcomplicating things too, thank you very much.
- Delk 6y ago
  You can still deploy stuff on a plain application server or whatever. The tools I've worked with haven't really required touching any kind of cluster management or other overhyped (albeit in some cases necessary) and complicated backend stuff if you didn't want to. (My backend experience is with Java and Python, though. I don't know how things are with other backend languages.) When I started looking into putting together a simple but modern frontend in my own time after having done only backend for years, it seemed like there's quite a lot of tooling and associated complexity that you kind of have to deal with just to get your frontend deployed, whether you need a complex architecture or not.

kreeben 6y ago

When React and Angular became popular I realized with great sadness that I was no longer a full stack dev and that I would never ever be one again. There's a whole group of us at work. The young devs laugh at our front-end abilities but they also look up to us because of our ability to elegantly hide our loops within loops within loops, with Linq. I haven't seen a performant LOB app in years.

nicbou 6y ago

My last frontend job was a few years ago, but I'm still writing VueJS apps the same way I used to. I don't feel like anything has really changed since then. I just got better at using the same tools. The only meaningful change from my perspective is that browsers can do more things. Backend is nice because you have greater control over the environment, and because testing data flows is easier than testing user interfaces. However, I was not a big fan of devops and cloud stuff, which felt too abstract to me.

codr7 6y ago

Slower perhaps, but it has definitely accumulated its share of complexity and ceremony along the way. Much of it is basic CRUD, built on top of a tower of complexity, crammed into a container and served by whatever cloud provider. I spend most of my time plugging and praying/crying.

Viliam1234 6y ago
My work feels like 5% analysis, 5% writing algorithms, 20% writing boilerplate code, 70% integration with some complex ill-documented monstrosity and debugging.

yen223 6y ago

The Kubernetes ecosystem is proof that backend engineers are perfectly capable of overcomplicating things too, thank you very much.

Delk 6y ago
You can still deploy stuff on a plain application server or whatever. The tools I've worked with haven't really required touching any kind of cluster management or other overhyped (albeit in some cases necessary) and complicated backend stuff if you didn't want to. (My backend experience is with Java and Python, though. I don't know how things are with other backend languages.) When I started looking into putting together a simple but modern frontend in my own time after having done only backend for years, it seemed like there's quite a lot of tooling and associated complexity that you kind of have to deal with just to get your frontend deployed, whether you need a complex architecture or not.