
Ask HN: Are front end and back end developers treated equally at your company? - kevintb
Equally as in respect for their work.<p>Why or why not?
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flukus
Backend almost always get's more respect and pay. There is simply a much
greater depth and breadth of knowledge required, business processes,
databases, queues, concurrency, security, deployments, the list goes on and
more often than not includes a fair share of front end knowledge as well.

IME when you need someone to analyze user requirements and build an efficient
UI it falls to the backend guys as well, because sorting out requirements is
also part of our job. More often than not the front end devs I've worked with
have been focused on making things pretty, making sure all the fonts match and
the colors look nice rather than focus on true usability, often this is all
they're empowered to do, they industry (sadly) makes little distinction
between UX and UI.

Of course these are gross generalizations and I've seen exceptions to all the
above points.

~~~
scalesolved
From my perspective pay has trended marginally higher for backend developers
and technical respect is usually also marginally higher for backend work.

However I feel that front end developer has a clear advantage in that their
work can be played with, viewed and commented on by non technical managers and
product owners. Also other external praise is usually along the lines of 'this
looks great', 'the ui is so smooth' than direct praise of what for the most
part is unseen backend work.

Many backend quality improvements for products can be deployed without a
product owner ever realising yet a front end and crucially visual change is
obvious. The product owner can go play with the new slick drop down menu, they
however can't go and easily play with the additional resiliency that you've
added to the internal message infrastructure for example.

Like you mentioned though these are generalisations and I too have seen
exceptions :)

~~~
sotojuan
> However I feel that front end developer has a clear advantage in that their
> work can be played with, viewed and commented on by non technical managers
> and product owners.

The downside of this is that you get a lot more "can you add this or change
that? Should be easy :-)". Non-technical folks think that because they can see
frontend work they know more about it.

Maybe I've had bad experiences but I consider the fact that the backend's work
can't be easily seen by the business people an advantage.

~~~
scalesolved
You make a good point! Non-technical folks are certainly less likely to
suggest how to tackle a backend problem.

I think though the backend really suffers in the sense that is not seen and
not heard unless there is an emergency in many cases.

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QuinnyPig
Most places I've been, FrontEnd was perceived as a place for more junior
developers. "We'd rather they mess up something visually than corrupt the
data" was the reasoning at the time.

Note that I'm not saying I agree with the sentiment!

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AznHisoka
in my previous companies, backend got much more respect and i believe
rightfully so. think of the hardest back end problem: its Google scale
requiring lots of PhDs to tackle it.

now think of the hardest front end problem. most likely its not even close.

~~~
bzalasky
While I can appreciate your perspective, there are plenty of hard problems on
the frontend. Many of them might fall outside the confines of the label
frontend (into graphics programming or linear algebra), just like Google scale
falls well outside what I'd call backend if we're sticking to a simple
dichotomy.

Here are a few harder problems that I can think of:

\- Draw a non-linear gradient along an arc with SVG

\- Implement a constraint solver in JS

\- Convert a CgBI image into a standard PNG with the browser File API

A good portion of the work I do on the frontend is transforming and composing
data, and wrangling that data together from a multitude of different services.
This honestly isn't that different from the work that I've done on the backend
of the stack.

I'm not trying to discount how hard problems can be when they're distributed,
just trying to point out that you can do interesting things in both domains.

