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Comment by gmadsen | Hacker News Reader

I think the argument might be that it takes less domain knowledge of hardware and all its abstractions, which does require a minimum threshold of reasoning and abstract thinking ability. I have high confidence someone who could built a database or kernel could also do front end work with a reasonable ramp up time.

I don’t share that confidence for the inverse in the nominal case

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I have seen many backend developers with this mindset and approach, and; 1) Tricky parts of frontend are afaict equally tricky as building a DB/kernel/whatever. 2) A typical mistake is that a lack of knowledge about the hard parts of frontend makes backend'ers assume frontend is easy, while in reality it's their ignorance (and arrogance) rather than the subject being the issue 3) As with backend, most developers don't deal with the harder parts. Most backend developers I've talked to do simple CRUDing + minor business logic from a DB. Similarly very few developers try to write their own drag and drop library from scratch.

It's sad that so many seems to fall into the trap of 2).

(I've done both types of development for 20+ years)

I have no idea what backend developer means to this or that person. It seems to mean "not frontend", so like, directly interacting with a database and possibly using a compiled or even unmanaged language? But still often deploying through something that looks like:

Haswell <- Borg Hypervisor <- Borg Pod <- KVM Hypervisor <- QEMU guest <- docker-compose <- docker <- golang

I'm talking about hackers. I remember being like 24 and and a colleague of mine (legend) had never worked in JavaScript or really the web before was on our pod that got tasked with writing a browser for J2ME and BREW that implemented real web pages.

He goes home that weekend, and he comes back on Monday with a stack machine written in JavaScript (ECMA-262, we ran it on Rhino back then because Spidermonkey was a whole thing) that executed a very cute subset of JavaScript, including lambda closure and therefore Church encoding / untyped System 1. I was like whoa, why in JS? "If I have to implement it in a month, I'm already two months late to start learning it."

Is that guy a frontend developer? Backend? Full Stack? He had worked on DSPs and audio before, and on video codecs and embedded.

My comment above about some of this stuff is harder isn't a diss to anyone, it doesn't make me a millimeter shorter that Carmack is so tall, walking around in some rarefied air of genius I can't even formulate a picture of: it inspires me to work harder, try more ambitious things, push every day a little past yesterday's limit, and it has for more than 30 years now.

There's nothing wrong with programming be a job, it's a perfectly reasonable life choice and a very sensible one in light of life's other demands and opportunities. But some of us fucking love it, think about it all the time, live to be good at it. That's a different set of outcomes. And it does grate a bit to have everyone pushing this "it's all the same, we're all the same, it's one equivalent thing", that's my passion you're talking about, I take great pride in my life's singular ambition and pursuit. We're equal but we're not the same.

The backend has plenty of complexities, but frontend developers have to deal with something just as complex - the user.

Given ramp up time, most backend engineers could build a bad frontend, or build a good one if they have a really good UX team that thought through everything and are just implementing their work.

In the real world though where UX is understaffed and often focused on the wrong problems - I've had to rescue too many frontends built by backend focused teams to share your confidence.

It's also that you're at the top of the stack. If your stuff breaks, there's no layer above you whose stuff also breaks.

Well except the end user, but depending on the app they can often be low-priority (internal apps, apps with captive audiences like online banking or airline websites, etc.).

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