Ask HN: Why is Front-End development looked down upon?
I am a &quot;back-end&quot; engineer that could be said to &quot;look down&quot; on front-end development, but the truth is more nuanced than that.<p>I actually think really great front-end development, when necessary, is hard to do and the folks who are interested in it and good at it are great Engineers. I also think that good User Experience is what makes money, though this doesn&#x27;t always mean lots of bells and whistles or even, what is traditionally thought to be, &quot;front-end&quot; development.<p>Unfortunately the barrier to entry is probably lowest in front-end development and so there are a lot of folks, when seeking a career change into software development, naturally gravitate to front-end, when their natural aptitude would probably be better suited to something else in tech, like product manage, devops, or even &quot;back-end&quot; engineering (though I will admit that &quot;back-end&quot; engineers tend to be biased against folks with non-technical degrees&#x2F;backgrounds).<p>The way I see it this creates a chain of negative causal effects. First, &quot;front-end&quot; is chalk-full of people who don&#x27;t know what they&#x27;re doing or talking about. Second, naturally being biased to think that the work they do is valuable and important, &quot;front-end&quot; engineers often advocate for lots of front-end rewrites and Rube-Goldberg-esque front-ends that aren&#x27;t actually necessary to the success of the product or business. The front-end is the most visible part of the product even though it is <i>often</i> the smallest piece of the product so business leaders, who have little technical experience, will often put the front-end team in a position of de-facto authority over the product or at least give them out-sized input. The stereotype that emerges is that front-end teams often get more resources then they need, get to rewrite the front-end once a year using the front-end framework du jour, when it is often not necessary to do so and a static website with few interfaces would actually not only be fine, but better. This is a trope that you will commonly find complained about on HN, and my own personal anecdotal experience confirms. I once worked at a company that had a massive back-end; not that VM count is always an indicator, but we had over 1000 large servers running our stack. Our front-end team was half the size of the back-end team and wrote their own CMS at one point. Two thirds of our users interactions (as evidenced by our server logs) were through the CLI that the back-end team maintained and wrote. Users often had no idea how to do something on the front-end, because there was so much feature clutter.<p>My personal opinion is that a lot of products actually don&#x27;t need as much front-end as they think and that hiring a design firm to come in at the beginning (and then once every two years) and hand off the front-end to a team of back-end engineers to keep up to date with features would probably be fine. Of course, of course, of course there are lots of exceptions to this, and I&#x27;m not suggesting a ratio of when this is true, but even if it&#x27;s 50&#x2F;50 that does not seem to justify the proliferation and front-end bloat that a lot of us have come to loathe.<p>My two cents.