Those salary demographics makes me doubt the entire data set. Over 40% of respondents make less than $50k
[0] https://2021.stateofjs.com/en-US/demographics/#yearly_salary
Edit: Only 14% of respondents are in the US, which probably explains the above.
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 So, you basically need people with lots of experience in completely outdated tech stacks that are willing to do that instead of using the new and shiny stuff that everybody else is doing.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.
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.
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.
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....
My experience has largely been the same. I would say the biggest mistake some companies make is thinking that the frontend will be "trivial" and hire a bunch of cheap and inexperienced devs.
On the one hand yes, if your bar for the UI is just making it look like the mockups then go right ahead and hire the cheap inexperienced folks. But without proper oversight and experienced developers there, the app almost always devolves into a nighmare.
Yes, but "needs" is different from "gets". I'm sure there are many places that hire experienced frontend developers, but the rule is that it's more a market of lemons than developers in general, so people jump out with time.