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Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

> I suspect at least part of the reason is to build a high barrier to entry and preserve the monopoly

That is far too grand a motive. The reality is that the average web developer has a shelf life of about 5 years or is primarily focused elsewhere, such as Java or C#. That said consider the people who do this work with 100% focus. These people are typically not the same developers who are performing graduate level statistical analysis, building artificial intelligence, or resolving quantum computing. The hiring expectations for front-end developers in the corporate world tend to skew much lower, and the historical average salaries for these positions reflect that. Taking this into account I suspect the real reason for the constant churn is that many of these developers want things to be easier everything else be damned.

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You are already downvoted into oblivion and rightfully so, but I just wanted to add my perspective as a backend developer (and the one who did post-graduate level mathematical stuff at that) who now manages a team of back and front end developers and plays with front end development for toy projects. The sheer amount of complexity and required knowledge for front end development is simply baffling to me. These folks have to know such disparate technologies as CSS, HTML, Javascript as a bare minimum and it never stops there. Typescript, templating engines, CSS preprocessors, huge and continuously evolving javascript ecosystem, evented concurrency (please take me back to my threads and semaphores), asynchronous state management in complex UIs with non-trivial interdependencies... Compared to this stochastic calculus is a breeze.

Totally agree. Also: I'm strongly against calling people "Front-End Developer" or anything like that at all. Where does front-end start? Where does it end? What is full-stack, does it imply you can do embedded? I've seen many listings that count PHP as one of the front-end requirements. This is just a term that should make the HR's job easier, and it does that badly.

We web devs actually have pretty solid definitions for "front-end," "back-end," and "full-stack." The back end deals with work on the server done after an incoming HTTP request comes in and involves preparing the HTTP response, including preparing the outgoing data for the templating layer if applicable (eg, when doing web page responses rather than JSON, XML, or binary responses). The front end deals with building templates such that that data becomes a standard web page, using CSS to style that page, and using JavaScript to implement client-side interactivity. A full-stack developer will be constantly switching between work from both sides of this divide rather than primarily focusing on one or the other.

If a job listing for a front-end developer is expecting applicants to know PHP beyond a "writing templates" level, it's either a poorly-written job listing or its creator has unrealistic expectations of its applicants - sadly, neither case is very uncommon in this industry.

At any rate, someone calling themselves a full-stack developer isn't implying they can do embedded, as that sort of stuff is pretty far afield of web development.

>The sheer amount of complexity and required knowledge for front end development is simply baffling to me.

And none of that complexity is essential to the task, which by itself is a testament of the quality of the “web platform”.

>The sheer amount of complexity and required knowledge for front end development is simply baffling to me

99% of it is self-inflicted though. You didn't need react/redux/sagas/uber popular framework 7.5 to do your job, but you and your coworkers thought "This is the cool new toy that facebook made!!!! Let's use it!!!" When 90% of web sites are reinventing a wheel made in 1994, there's no reason to actually do most of this junk

Bullshit. More and more front-end developers are building applications. These projects aren't in anyway equivalent to a 1994 website.

I agree that you don’t need any of that madness. It is self imposed pain by developers wanting easy over simple and work arounds over original code.

See the framework fallacy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20014888

This is the most arrogant and condescending comment I think I've ever read on HN, you spend so many words dancing around it, just call web developers stupid and lazy instead of wasting so much space.

It's not good enough to for me to be an arrogant techno-mage looking down on those stupid commoners from my technical tower, I must now also shit on all the other lower developers I have judged to be not as smart as me, some other class of developer.

Fuck off.

Also, I will say, some of the worst engineering I have ever seen has been on these allegedly superior engineers that work in AI and statistical analysis.

Maybe self reflection or hubris is the issue?

And yet, I can build world scale cloud systems but can’t build a web front end anymore to save my life.

I’m blown away by the sheer complexity that has evolved in frontend code. Developers there have such a broad toolset and arcane knowledge about how you really need to combine two CSS traits on surrounding containers to get the positioning you want.

Unfortunately, in our industry, most engineers think the layer above theirs is a trivial composition of parts

And Rube Goldberg machines are engineering marvels, but we shouldn't laud the engineer who builds one to transport a part from here to there when a "simple" conveyor belt does the job just fine.

How much of that complexity was necessary? How much of it was chosen to boost someone's CV?

I mean a lot of the complexity in the front end has arisen from the need of the business to provide more feature full experiences, not because some developer thought he could pad his CV. Developers aren't developing complicated front ends to pad CVs, they are developing complicated front ends because the business needs it to solve certain problems.

I agree that the frontend landscape is too complex, but much of that is self imposed. Most developers on the client side refuse to string two lines of code together without a framework or large abstraction library. Offers of reducing complexity such as removing unnecessary decoration in the code or returning to a standards driven approach is often met with hostility. Much of this complexity is the result of striving for comfort and easiness. Simplicity isn’t easy.

As an example consider this recent comment that was upvoted 11 times and some of the responses to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20021708

While jaded, I don't think your reasoning is valid. If the question is, "Why suspect an organization to coordinate with another to establish a dominant position in manufacturing or standardization in order to create a barrier to entry/monopoly for potential competitors?" I'm pretty sure the answer has nothing to do with web developers, even if that's the subject at hand in the context of this question.

My reasoning is primarily a consideration of where pressure and redirection of web standards originates. For example consider how classes landed in ES6. The maintainers of the standard didn’t want classes, but hands down they were the single most requested feature of that specification.

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