Ask HN: Are back-end developers a commodity? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are back-end developers a commodity?

3 pointsdudul2 comments

I just started reading "React Quickly" by Azat Mardan ( https://www.manning.com/books/react-quickly ), and right in the Preface he makes the claim that:

"Most business value now lies in UIs. The backend is a commodity. In the Bay Area, where I live and work, most job openings in software engineering are for front-end or (a trendy new title) generalist/fullstack developers. Only a few big companies like Google, Amazon, and Capital One still have relatively strong demand for data scientists and back-end engineers."

I personally find this claim absolutely idiotic since I feel like I still see an enormous amount of job postings for backend roles. Do you think he's right?

He's selling a book for frontend developers. It's good business sense to flatter your audience.

In my experience (and I started as a frontend engineer and then moved backwards in the stack while at Google, then founded my own company), most business value lies in the back-end. That's where your durable competitive advantage is. The thing is that backend is more specialized - you can't really specialize in backend engineering in general, you specialize in a particular problem domain that has a particular set of algorithms and data structures used to solve it. That's why you often see more job postings for front-end engineers: the market is more liquid, the frameworks are more ubiquitous, the skillsets are more commoditized, and so you'll see postings for "React engineer" or "iPhone developer" or "Android developer". When looking for a backend position, that same company may want an engineer with experience using Spark & Kafka to process the Twitter firehose.

The front end styles/fads change so often that it's hard for UI to become a commodity. The back-end is a bit more stable, for the executives won't complain about not having the latest UI craze because they can't see the back-end. It may indeed pay better to be in UI, but it usually also means you have to keep your skills up to date on your own dime.

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