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Honestly that's why I swapped from front-end at the beginning of my career. Back end and infra moves much slower, jobs tend to be more secure and specialized, a

by nvarsj 4y ago

Honestly that's why I swapped from front-end at the beginning of my career. Back end and infra moves much slower, jobs tend to be more secure and specialized, and pay seems higher overall. Learning Java back in the 00s was one of my best career moves.

cutler 4y ago
Do you see much evidence of Kotlin eating Java's lunch as some have predicted?
jongjong 4y ago
I agree. Also, back end tends to have fewer mega-trends. You usually have the option to stick to your old tools. There are still plenty of C/C++ back end jobs for example. The community keeps branching off. On the front end, the trends tend to be more extreme; people will not take you seriously unless you give up on whatever tools you use and go straight for React or VueJS... Then when TypeScript comes along, everyone has to switch to that... I couldn't believe it when people started combining JSX with TypeScript... It's essentially a double-transpiled language now... The trends keep adding more complexity and everyone is forced to switch to that regardless.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  As someone who really appreciates strong typing, I will die on this hill - I hate Typescript. Introducing a transpiled typing system on top of a dynamically typed language is a recipe for all sorts of insane complexity, which is what I experience whenever I try to use TS. If you consider all the time and effort it took to introduce types for every NPM project out there, all the development of the language itself, the effort expended by individual devs and teams to learn the syntax... ...might it have been the same amount of effort just to introduce some strong types into Javascript itself? It's not like the language can't adapt, and there are already some strong types when you're working with the graphics APIs.
  - Existenceblinks 4y ago
    Reminds me of javascript the good part thin vs thick book meme. TS the good part is thin as well, though no one sets rules how many features they should use. Unsound type is bad enough, too many features make it worse. I wish they delete TS features, not trying to add more things to already broken underlying language (js)
  - jongjong 4y ago
    I'm in a similar boat. I appreciate static typing and although I don't have any strong objections to TypeScript purely as a language, I can't get past the way it's transpiled into a dynamically typed language with source maps... Seems like a hack. It doesn't make sense; kind of like transpiling lower level assembly code into higher level C code. You could always argue that there is value in forcing arbitrary constraints onto developers but in the end, you need to ask the question "is it worth the complexity?"
  - golergka 4y ago
    > ...might it have been the same amount of effort just to introduce some strong types into Javascript itself? And how would it be different? I've been using TS since 2016, both for front and back-end, and I can count an amount of times the transpilation abstraction leaked on one hand (and most of these were when I just learning TS and worked on weirdly configured projects). Aside from these, I could just forget about the fact that it's transpiled to JS under the hood.
    - danielvaughn 4y ago
      Interesting, maybe it's just been my personal experience. I often work at the native DOM level, where the API is extremely forgiving and dynamic. The type system does not work well there, as I found several instances where the underlying type definition didn't match what the native API actually had available. My only recourse in those moments was to either use `any` or to write my own type definition (which I am not going to do).
  - striking 4y ago
    > might it have been the same amount of effort just to introduce some strong types into Javascript itself? TypeScript exists as a first step to adding types to JS. Some folks are currently trying to figure out a way to add type annotations that the JS engine will just ignore for now based on what we've learned from TS.
cageface 4y ago
Back end seems to be changing quite quickly too. Docker, k8s, serverless, a million different specialized cloud services, all kinds of non-sql DBs etc. I'm sure you can find a job doing backend that doesn't involve following these trends but you can also still find plenty of front end jobs using jQuery.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  If anything, it feels like frontend has slowed down tremendously whereas backend has sped up. That said, both are pushing for more cross-discipline experience in some form (fullstack, devops, UX/UI for frontend, etc.)
  - KptMarchewa 4y ago
    Data-related things are moving at least as fast as pre-react/typescript era javascript.

by nvarsj 4y ago

cutler 4y ago

Do you see much evidence of Kotlin eating Java's lunch as some have predicted?

jongjong 4y ago

I agree. Also, back end tends to have fewer mega-trends. You usually have the option to stick to your old tools. There are still plenty of C/C++ back end jobs for example. The community keeps branching off. On the front end, the trends tend to be more extreme; people will not take you seriously unless you give up on whatever tools you use and go straight for React or VueJS... Then when TypeScript comes along, everyone has to switch to that... I couldn't believe it when people started combining JSX with TypeScript... It's essentially a double-transpiled language now... The trends keep adding more complexity and everyone is forced to switch to that regardless.

danielvaughn 4y ago
As someone who really appreciates strong typing, I will die on this hill - I hate Typescript. Introducing a transpiled typing system on top of a dynamically typed language is a recipe for all sorts of insane complexity, which is what I experience whenever I try to use TS. If you consider all the time and effort it took to introduce types for every NPM project out there, all the development of the language itself, the effort expended by individual devs and teams to learn the syntax... ...might it have been the same amount of effort just to introduce some strong types into Javascript itself? It's not like the language can't adapt, and there are already some strong types when you're working with the graphics APIs.
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  Reminds me of javascript the good part thin vs thick book meme. TS the good part is thin as well, though no one sets rules how many features they should use. Unsound type is bad enough, too many features make it worse. I wish they delete TS features, not trying to add more things to already broken underlying language (js)
- jongjong 4y ago
  I'm in a similar boat. I appreciate static typing and although I don't have any strong objections to TypeScript purely as a language, I can't get past the way it's transpiled into a dynamically typed language with source maps... Seems like a hack. It doesn't make sense; kind of like transpiling lower level assembly code into higher level C code. You could always argue that there is value in forcing arbitrary constraints onto developers but in the end, you need to ask the question "is it worth the complexity?"
- golergka 4y ago
  > ...might it have been the same amount of effort just to introduce some strong types into Javascript itself? And how would it be different? I've been using TS since 2016, both for front and back-end, and I can count an amount of times the transpilation abstraction leaked on one hand (and most of these were when I just learning TS and worked on weirdly configured projects). Aside from these, I could just forget about the fact that it's transpiled to JS under the hood.
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    Interesting, maybe it's just been my personal experience. I often work at the native DOM level, where the API is extremely forgiving and dynamic. The type system does not work well there, as I found several instances where the underlying type definition didn't match what the native API actually had available. My only recourse in those moments was to either use `any` or to write my own type definition (which I am not going to do).
- striking 4y ago
  > might it have been the same amount of effort just to introduce some strong types into Javascript itself? TypeScript exists as a first step to adding types to JS. Some folks are currently trying to figure out a way to add type annotations that the JS engine will just ignore for now based on what we've learned from TS.

cageface 4y ago

Back end seems to be changing quite quickly too. Docker, k8s, serverless, a million different specialized cloud services, all kinds of non-sql DBs etc. I'm sure you can find a job doing backend that doesn't involve following these trends but you can also still find plenty of front end jobs using jQuery.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
If anything, it feels like frontend has slowed down tremendously whereas backend has sped up. That said, both are pushing for more cross-discipline experience in some form (fullstack, devops, UX/UI for frontend, etc.)
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  Data-related things are moving at least as fast as pre-react/typescript era javascript.