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Comment by mvdtnz | Hacker News Reader

My experience with very highly paid frontend developers is they like to spend hours and hours (and thousands and thousands of dollars) building out little libraries and components and frameworks that will enable other teams to be faster. Except this never eventuates because things rarely turn out to be reusable along the right axis so a new component or library or framework is developed to solve the problem.

On top of this UI developer propellor-heads love to spend time (and money) pontificating on abstract theories about functional programming and homomorphisms and endofunctors so they can render some text inside a <b> tag. It's how we wound up with utterly ridiculous pieces of code like the "hooks" API in React.

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Can’t get promoted pumping out 10 great pages. But a library that you can claim will enhance the productivity of 100 other engineers? Now that’s IMPACT!!

Except you’re at a company where everyone has figured this out so now you have 4 competing libraries with their own teams which are all 1/2 done making every engineer less productive cause they all have bugs and slightly different priorities.

this is exactly the frontend team from a previous role. we were losing millions a month and had 2 major cuts within 4 months - and instead of cleaning up or simplifying our bloated frontend, the teams responsible for it started building new component libraries for the rest of the org to use on future pages

4 competing in-house libs? How can that ever happen? Is middle management non-existant? That is anarchy, hehe

I also get the feeling that modern frontend is a massive money pit but this seems to be a leadership problem. I wouldn't go so far as to blame the IC. There are developers over-engineering in every ecosystem.

Something about the psychology of front-end - not quite as hardcore technical, a little more humanities-aligned - perhaps makes them even more susceptible.

The self-consciously cool kids are always going to be more easily swayed by fashion than cave hermits.

You forgot the part where everything has to be redone every 5-10 years despite grand allusions of reusability because of the cyclic nature of the frontend market. The JS framework proliferation is largely driven by skills becoming obsolete (or needing to become obsolete for economic reasons) as younger frontend devs move in who want to carve their niche and distance themselves from "horrible" previous-gen unmaintainable and wayyy overengineered stuff. Which was objectively unmaintainable either from the start as a work of love of a developer who put all his thoughts into it so it became incomprehensible ;) or became unmaintainable when later developers (who couldn't care less) had to violate the original grand vision of state encapsulation or hypermedia architecture or whatever for a trivial business form app.

I guess the good thing is that comprehending our absurd web frontend creations is beyond current LLM's capabilities.

I've done a lot of back-end and a bit of front end development. You're correctly identifying a crappy outcome, but incorrectly attributing the effect of shitty developers and project management with whole disciplines and common practices within them.

I've had exactly the same experience.

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