Ask HN: Is there still a future for front end developers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there still a future for front end developers?

10 pointsramesh317 comments

I’ve been doing this for a decade now, and increasingly it seems that job listings are almost exclusively “full stack”, or just “software engineer” now. Are the days of specialized front end developers coming to an end?

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[I'm a backend dev, so with an obligatory grain of salt...]

I think the "full stack" or "software engineer" positions are either at small companies that need flexible employees or cheap ones thinking they can get 2 of them for less than 1 frontend + 1 backend and of similar quality.

Another category could be startups even not so small ones that leverage backend-as-a-service and their 'fullstack' devs are mostly frontend ones that can read/use third-party APIs.

So to answer your question, yes. I don't think lowcode etc produces top-tier UX and until then good frontend devs is a competitive edge. Until its not a competitive benefit, there will be a market.

I'd say that good front-end devs are just getting started with seeing what's possible.

Think about future user interfaces on the web: peoples' expectations for quality are becoming much higher and the market might majorly start to trend towards PWAs that have to try and rival Native Apps in quality. You need seriously sharp devs to pull this stuff off at a high level and make it work fast.

Additionally, we're just getting started in terms of metaverse and 3d stuff. Forget Zuckerberg's nonsense, but just think in terms of what an actual good browser based 3d world might look like with webgl and shaders: you need talented front-end devs to push the limits on that kind of stuff.

Heh, it feels like we're reinventing ActiveX and VRML.

Frontend continues to spiral out of complexity, I strongly doubt it. A lot of said complexity is moving to the server with SSR etc - I'd still say this sort of work is considered "frontend development", even if you are writing code that runs on the server - ultimately frontend is about building a user interface, which are becoming increasingly complex.

Backend is still booming. I went backend to embedded myself. And while I’m now working full-time for a company that deals with embedded systems and has a small backend team, I work with them on backend projects like a regular developer.

My main area of expertise are C++ networking libraries. I wyote and maintain one myselg.

Are we going full circle? Obviously not but there are some arguments for it.

First of first was: webmaster

Then it was: web designer (did it all)

Then: web developer

Then: frontend dev / backend dev

Now: full stack/software engineer

No, but the pendulum might be swinging back towards more server driven apps using WebSockets or other techniques to reload page elements vs. front end SPA. The front-end still needs to be developed but if its served from back end code then I can see a lot lighter front-end work. From my naive understanding there are a lot of JS frameworks/libraries that deal with validation of user input, maintaining state of data+DOM and tests around ensuring those things are taken care of, entirely in front-end code. All of those things can be done from the back end and the dynamic refresh of data/page is taken care of with less JS on front-end.

From a back end perspective, the back end has to check inputs coming into controllers and have tests around what has to happen before doing DB operations so a lot of the work in front end to do similar seems redundant.

All that being said, there is still a lot of work that goes into building a front end for an application. Even if it is back end code generating the HTML/CSS for page fragments, they still have to work in a cohesive way on the front-end. If you can be conversant and learn similar things (maintaining state, validation, tests) in whatever back end language is used then you should be fine.

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