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> Another issue is that these programs (KodeWithKlossy and SheCodes) only teach "front-end" web development, which is quickly becoming a woman dominated field.

> Another issue is that these programs (KodeWithKlossy and SheCodes) only teach "front-end" web development, which is quickly becoming a woman dominated field. Is that good? I don't think so. Historically, when women enter certain fields, it "lowers" the value of it. Front-end development is now seen as "easier" then backend or frontend. I'm a firm believer women should not pick up front-end as their "path" into tech. What? I don't understand this on a bunch of levels. * What's the difference between "front-end" and "frontend"? * Woman-dominated? I have been interviewing for a bunch of "frontend" roles and I've gotten a grand total of one woman to apply. Some of that's on me for not recruiting in woman-friendlier places, but this is not my experience at all. * Frontend has been "easier" for my ~20 years in the field. A lot fewer things can go wrong, with a lot lower stakes. Women entering "frontend" development aren't newly creating this sense, it's been there the whole time. I definitely want to improve my recruitment pipeline to involve more women, but some of the stuff here just seems very different from my experiences. I also firmly disagree with discouraging people from pursuing an area of software dev they find interesting; if a woman wants to write code on the frontend, why on earth would anyone want to discourage that?!

melony 5y ago
Because then it will be regarded a "softer" engineering domain and the market will implicitly price the alleged lack of rigor accordingly. Just take a look at the gender ratio for "human computer interaction (HCI)" students in CS academia, aka UI/UX designers. It is important that we don't funnel aspiring female engineers into a less rigorous domain just because it is more popular with their gender. The education system should not reinforce stereotypes at such an early stage. If they still want dedicate their career to fiddling with CSS variables after 4 years of education, great. They can do that after mastering foundational CS concepts so the system doesn't accidentally segregate and create a caste of second-class workers.
- jahewson 5y ago
  You’re really just saying that a CS degree should be used to gatekeep frontend work.
  - melony 5y ago
    Sorry if my comment came off that way, I meant the opposite. I am a strong believer in making software engineering more accessible and as anti-accreditation as you can reasonably get. I even believe that the current medical accreditation system ought to be changed to be more in line like law where medical schools admissions are not allowed to solely control the production of doctors. What I meant regarding aspiring female engineers is that those going into the traditional CS route should not have their career choices be subtly influenced by existing industry trends and the tertiary education system should do everything it can to prevent that.
    - hiptobecubic 5y ago
      That sounds good, but I think their point was that it works in the other direction too and you're ignoring it just because it's status quo. Right now, instead of becoming an expert in HCI, everyone is funneled into classes about database indices because some department chair thinks that "real" computer science is bit-twiddling and cache invalidation. You must specialize in the C before you can learn about the H in HCI. Why not the other way around? I think by far most of the problems that make development difficult are human problems. Why shouldn't we push all the CS students to study psych and writing first?
dehrmann 5y ago
> What's the difference between "front-end" and "frontend"? It's just a style/proofreading issue. You knew that.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  Is it? The author says one is easier than the other, that feels more substantive. I do assume there's some kind of proofreading issue, but it's ambiguous and I don't know how to resolve it, hence my mention.
- msla 5y ago
  > Front-end development is now seen as "easier" then backend or frontend. This makes absolutely no sense if "Front-end" is the same as "frontend" and you knew that.
SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
Firstly, I don’t agree with the notion that frontend is easier or that women shouldn’t pursue frontend. But I will say that it’s a repeated trend that when women enter an industry, pay for that industry in particular goes down (this happened to teachers for example).
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  I've done both at a decently high level (leading teams to do both, if that means anything to you), and I can say for certain that there is an entire order of magnitude fewer problems working on the frontend than working on the backend. I can also say hiring for a frontend dev does not mean they can do backend work, whereas a backend dev (in my experience) is able to jump into the frontend with relatively little friction when needed. YMMV of course, but this has been what I've see in in my ~20 years.
  - melony 5y ago
    I have the opposite experience. My experience with junior engineers out of the modern CS education is that the current leetcode based system is impressive at churning out a backend engineers who can write functional boilerplate code and algorithms. As long as you have a senior engineer supervising the overall architecture and doing code reviews for security issues, fresh grads are basically easy to replace cogs in the backend factory. Frontend on the other hand requires much more experienced candidates to deal with resource constrained systems, especially when it comes to animation heavy and fat client/WebAssembly apps where every frame counts.
    - TameAntelope 5y ago
      Resource constraints? That is not something 90+/-9% of frontend developers need to care about. Backend devs will hit resources constraints a lot earlier than frontend devs will, anyway.
      - melony 5y ago
        No? Server and cloud resources have almost zero marginal cost at most medium sized and above companies unless you are doing something truly intensive like video encoding. For most web apps, you can go a long way by just scaling horizontally and throwing more ram at the problem. On the hand, you don't have any control at all for the frontend, especially for consumer products.
dehrmann 5y ago
Focusing on frontend is pretty typical of code academies. My guess is because it's easy to inspire someone when they build an interface to some they'd actually use. Unless you're already a developer, backend systems are further from things people actually do. It's also an easier sell because it's easier to explain to people what they'll do--you just show them.
zozbot234 5y ago
Front-end development is not "easy" or "trivial". This misguided perception is exactly what leads to hacked-together websites full of div-tag soup, zero accessibility, and forcing their users to run huge amounts of pointless JavaScript which ruins their devices' battery life. Please everyone, stop doing that and learn to build professional "front ends" to your webcrap.
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  It would help if the getting started documentation on the major entry points didn't advise the opposite. How is a beginner supposed to know? Most of the people they'll encounter along the way think it's completely reasonable to pull in a gigabyte of unaudited dependency upon unaudited dependency for a new app before they've done any kind of design work to determine what they might need.

melony 5y ago

Because then it will be regarded a "softer" engineering domain and the market will implicitly price the alleged lack of rigor accordingly. Just take a look at the gender ratio for "human computer interaction (HCI)" students in CS academia, aka UI/UX designers. It is important that we don't funnel aspiring female engineers into a less rigorous domain just because it is more popular with their gender. The education system should not reinforce stereotypes at such an early stage. If they still want dedicate their career to fiddling with CSS variables after 4 years of education, great. They can do that after mastering foundational CS concepts so the system doesn't accidentally segregate and create a caste of second-class workers.

jahewson 5y ago
You’re really just saying that a CS degree should be used to gatekeep frontend work.
- melony 5y ago
  Sorry if my comment came off that way, I meant the opposite. I am a strong believer in making software engineering more accessible and as anti-accreditation as you can reasonably get. I even believe that the current medical accreditation system ought to be changed to be more in line like law where medical schools admissions are not allowed to solely control the production of doctors. What I meant regarding aspiring female engineers is that those going into the traditional CS route should not have their career choices be subtly influenced by existing industry trends and the tertiary education system should do everything it can to prevent that.
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    That sounds good, but I think their point was that it works in the other direction too and you're ignoring it just because it's status quo. Right now, instead of becoming an expert in HCI, everyone is funneled into classes about database indices because some department chair thinks that "real" computer science is bit-twiddling and cache invalidation. You must specialize in the C before you can learn about the H in HCI. Why not the other way around? I think by far most of the problems that make development difficult are human problems. Why shouldn't we push all the CS students to study psych and writing first?

dehrmann 5y ago

> What's the difference between "front-end" and "frontend"? It's just a style/proofreading issue. You knew that.

TameAntelope 5y ago
Is it? The author says one is easier than the other, that feels more substantive. I do assume there's some kind of proofreading issue, but it's ambiguous and I don't know how to resolve it, hence my mention.
msla 5y ago
> Front-end development is now seen as "easier" then backend or frontend. This makes absolutely no sense if "Front-end" is the same as "frontend" and you knew that.

SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago

Firstly, I don’t agree with the notion that frontend is easier or that women shouldn’t pursue frontend. But I will say that it’s a repeated trend that when women enter an industry, pay for that industry in particular goes down (this happened to teachers for example).

TameAntelope 5y ago
I've done both at a decently high level (leading teams to do both, if that means anything to you), and I can say for certain that there is an entire order of magnitude fewer problems working on the frontend than working on the backend. I can also say hiring for a frontend dev does not mean they can do backend work, whereas a backend dev (in my experience) is able to jump into the frontend with relatively little friction when needed. YMMV of course, but this has been what I've see in in my ~20 years.
- melony 5y ago
  I have the opposite experience. My experience with junior engineers out of the modern CS education is that the current leetcode based system is impressive at churning out a backend engineers who can write functional boilerplate code and algorithms. As long as you have a senior engineer supervising the overall architecture and doing code reviews for security issues, fresh grads are basically easy to replace cogs in the backend factory. Frontend on the other hand requires much more experienced candidates to deal with resource constrained systems, especially when it comes to animation heavy and fat client/WebAssembly apps where every frame counts.
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    Resource constraints? That is not something 90+/-9% of frontend developers need to care about. Backend devs will hit resources constraints a lot earlier than frontend devs will, anyway.
    - melony 5y ago
      No? Server and cloud resources have almost zero marginal cost at most medium sized and above companies unless you are doing something truly intensive like video encoding. For most web apps, you can go a long way by just scaling horizontally and throwing more ram at the problem. On the hand, you don't have any control at all for the frontend, especially for consumer products.

dehrmann 5y ago

Focusing on frontend is pretty typical of code academies. My guess is because it's easy to inspire someone when they build an interface to some they'd actually use. Unless you're already a developer, backend systems are further from things people actually do. It's also an easier sell because it's easier to explain to people what they'll do--you just show them.

zozbot234 5y ago

Front-end development is not "easy" or "trivial". This misguided perception is exactly what leads to hacked-together websites full of div-tag soup, zero accessibility, and forcing their users to run huge amounts of pointless JavaScript which ruins their devices' battery life. Please everyone, stop doing that and learn to build professional "front ends" to your webcrap.

mkr-hn 5y ago
It would help if the getting started documentation on the major entry points didn't advise the opposite. How is a beginner supposed to know? Most of the people they'll encounter along the way think it's completely reasonable to pull in a gigabyte of unaudited dependency upon unaudited dependency for a new app before they've done any kind of design work to determine what they might need.