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Frontend development is not a great career path; it's mostly a young people's game. I know senior react developers in their thirties that are increasingly strug
by jillesvangurp 5y ago
Frontend development is not a great career path; it's mostly a young people's game. I know senior react developers in their thirties that are increasingly struggling to find well paying gigs because they are competing with young people at half their rate. A lot of frontend developers transition to full stack js and from there to doing more serious things using Go, Rust, or whatever. That's where the money is. It's a natural path for them.
Frontend projects have a few issues:
- They are mostly greenfield projects with relatively new and immature technology.
- They mostly have short shelf lives since UIs get replaced after a few years.
- A lot of the new and shiny stuff ends up moving the problem rather than solving it. So, there's a lot of change happening more or less continuously but a lot of the problems stay the same.
- And of course there is the notion that developer demographics dictate that there are about 4x more developers available who never worked with what was fashionable 10 years ago. The amount of developers keeps on doubling every five years, so most of the talent on the market will never have heard of or worked with stuff fashionable ten years ago.
So, hiring frontend developers to work on some old legacy code base built with whatever was fashionable 5-10 years ago is hard and expensive. First of all it's rare for projects to survive that long and usually they are not in a great shape if they do. So, you basically need people with lots of experience in completely outdated tech stacks that are willing to do that instead of using the new and shiny stuff that everybody else is doing. All of those people are now at an age where they would be charging senior rates with no guarantee that they are any good. It's a tough one. Paying more is a good strategy but you'd still need to find somebody willing to do it.
Of course, all the good developers will prefer greenfield projects because if they are that good, they will have the choice and they'll mostly choose for investing in learning new stuff rather than working on somebody else's shitty code base. That actually drives a lot of frontend projects to an early death. They'd be salvageable in principle except there's nobody around still willing to do it. It's literally cheaper to start from scratch than it is to hire to keep an old project going. You actually risk losing good frontend developers if you fail to do that. Because they'll have options elsewhere.
- cageface 5y agoThis hasn't been my experience at all. People are building increasingly complicated apps like Figma in the browser and are happy to hire senior developers and pay them well. If anything I see the number of back end roles diminishing as people increasingly delegate that stuff to various cloud services.
- jillesvangurp 5y agoFigma has been great new thing that simply did not exist ten year ago. I know a co-founder of a competitor to Figma called fluid UI. That was working on that around that time. Shiny new stuff in other words.
- krembanan 5y agoDo you have any data to back this up at all? My experience is opposite, many backend jobs have been replaced by different BaaS', while most of the programming is done on the frontend. If you hire a younger developer half your rate, you get what you pay for. Complicated frontend projects needs good seniors, and they get paid their fair share. IME demand for experienced and talented frontend seniors have never been higher, as frontend continues to expand in complexity, and more logic is handled on the frontend-stack (routing, API-routes with eg. Nextjs, SSG/SSR and so on.
- jillesvangurp 5y agoAll of the frontend stuff I've been involved with (mostly as a backend developer) has long been retired. There's not a single thing I can point at that lived for more than 2-3 years before getting shelved or replaced. The stuff you mention I would classify as shiny new stuff. Easy to hire for now and in fact I know a few guys looking to hire exactly that kind of skills. It's going to be different in a few years because by then it will be unfashionably old stuff. Angular, backbone, jquery were the fashionable stuff ten years go. Who even uses backbone at this point? Their last release was 3 years ago. That's the kind of now unfashionable thing that has probably been largely replaced or shelved by now. They had a pretty big community of users back in the day. Interesting data point if you are looking for one to figure out what happened to all those projects. There are still about 620K downloads per week so there clearly are some projects still pulling that in. But apparently they've not needed a new version since February 2019, which was when the last release was tagged. Good luck if you are hiring for such projects.
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y agoI don't think it's so much about fashion/trends as it is about ever increasing user expectations, and frankly JS/HTML/Web is the best of the worst solutions. It's not ideal but its the fastest and most accessible. Everything started going to shit in front-end after the iPhone was released. You had the emergence of web apps, web as a platform, pervasive social media, so many horrible things....