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Comment by mumblemumble | Hacker News Reader

Not only are good frontend engineers rare, but I've also noticed that it seems to be common for the best ones to migrate out of frontend work. They get tired of spending all day fighting with colleagues who have coding skills but not design acumen, and the same traits that make them a good frontend engineer also make it very easy to transition to a role that comes with a less psychologically costly work environment.

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Personally, I love front end work. I love the crazy challenges and weird constraints. I love seeing a UI — something that a human interacts with — at the end of the process. Server side work can be interesting for a little while, but if I don’t see the results in the UI, it feels hollow.

Strangely, even though I’ve been doing this for twenty five years and I’ve never been better at it, in today’s bullshit interviewing environment, I can’t get a job because I can’t solve algorithms or do system designs in forty five minutes. And so I’m sitting on the sidelines right now. It’s the most bizarre experience of my career.

Yeah I totally get that.

I’ve created projects that are used by the entire business and customer facing part of the company, which are so rock solid and user-friendly that the users and even developers who’ve come after me completely takes the functionality for granted.

One feature in particular, I came up with a lot of the UI myself, even while working with a designer. I made the backend work. I spent a lot of effort making it just feel good. It went out, I got congratulations, it was great. Now, 3 years later, it still works with minimal maintenance. Entire processes of the business have been built on top of that functionality. Everyone completely takes for granted that this highly complex system has worked with nearly zero issues for years, and allowed a ton of new features using it as a base.

And honestly building something complex that works so well that everyone takes it for granted is an amazing feeling.

I’m just extremely lucky to have management that recognizes it and has seen the value in that contribution. But I don’t know how I’d ever sell this to another company if I were to look for another job in the future.

If your skills support it, perhaps try repositioning yourself as "a designer who codes" or "UX Engineer".

I’m not a designer, though. And that would be selling my engineering skills short. Coding is a relatively small part of good software engineering.

Spot on.

Front end is how I got started programming, both as a hobby and professionally. It has a certain tangible quality to it that makes it both approachable and satisfying, but that often gets misconstrued as "easy". It's not easy!

I spent several years doing mostly-FE work and all the bikeshedding and meddling and "just make it do X why is it so hard?" burned that appreciation right out of me. It's also the first thing to get blamed for every bug and error, because it's what you see and interact with, which is just exhausting.

I took the technical skills I learned and transitioned to mostly backend where there's more "trust" (i.e., I don't understand what you do so I'll just let you do it) and autonomy. A small part of me misses the visually demonstrable part of front end, but the work culture around it I don't miss one iota.

Being blamed for all the bugs and issues is causing a lot of burnout for me over the last year. More often than not the issue is not with my code, but either an issue with the back end or a matter of the QA person not understanding what they're testing. I totally agree, it'sexhausting, and it's refreshing to see someone else say so.

Yeah I moved out of frontend work for the backend. Backend work is a series of black boxes. You can make a million mistakes and it won't necessarily be an issue. With the frontend your work is exposed for everyone to see and critique. Not only that, but it's very hard to actually compartmentalize changes. A component that looks fine in isolation might be completely out of place in a larger peice. I frequently found myself near panicking that I didn't mess something up before launch because it was nearly impossible to handle all cases that we cared about through tests. Of course we would hire people to run through the site once before launch. But what about after we fix all the bugs? Did we introduce new ones after fixing the old? Are all of our translations stoll appropriate? Where they ever?

While I don't do frontend work, I still push UX and management to minimize the surface area and complexity of the frontend. Keep to simple html elements, flowing top to bottom with minimal css, etc.

Personally I try to find work where:

1. I'm the only FE dev, with a strict separation between BE and FE work (and a BE team that's happy with this arrangement).

2. I'm given the keys to the castles in terms of technology and architecture for the FE.

This lets me maximize time spent understanding our product, our users, and iterating with PM/Design.

That, and you have to spend so much time justifying your value. Most people can appreciate when things look nice. However the bar is usually pretty low, set to above “barely working” in most cases. That, coupled with the things you mentioned above, makes the field difficult.

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