I think there's a big part of the picture being missed here. Frontend is bad because of how the industry treats frontend engineering, and web engineering overall. Companies will make engineers do way more than just focus on the code and build things properly and correctly. This is why they all gravitate towards the new, shiny library and over time the ecosystem is a huge mess of dozens upon dozens of libraries just to build something simple. They want engineers to be more like a technical entrepreneur, thinking about how to add value to the business, and this comes at the expense of building things properly and correctly.
> On a more personal note, this is frustrating to me because I think it’s a big part of why we’re seeing the web stagnate so much. I still run into lots of devs who are creative and enthusiastic about building cool things. They just can’t.
Yes, because they're not allowed to just code. It's no longer enough for the role, and the expectations include everything from talking to stakeholders, to crafting the requirements, to testing, releasing, and doing the telemetry and analyticis. Obviously nobody will have the focus or time to build anything properly this way, and they will always choose to use external libraries instead of making something from scratch that will fit the domain space and will allow full control to build something with no bugs.
It's amazing how the industry has accepted that bugs are normal, and part of building frontends, when good engineering should mean that you are able to build and ship something with almost zero bugs. The industry has changed the role and steered it away from what engineering is supposed to be, which is building things properly, and now people are scratching their heads as to why we have such bad software and everything is so complicated on the frontend.
> They want engineers to be more like a technical entrepreneur, thinking about how to add value to the business, and this comes at the expense of building things properly and correctly.
The reason is that most business are marketing driven, where the focus is let's try this to see if it sticks. Everything from the product to the technical implementation is a prototype where no ones can articulate a specification for anything. The same has infected Windows and macOS where no focus is given to the whole, but it's just adding beta features on top of other beta features.
> On a more personal note, this is frustrating to me because I think it’s a big part of why we’re seeing the web stagnate so much. I still run into lots of devs who are creative and enthusiastic about building cool things. They just can’t.
Yes, because they're not allowed to just code. It's no longer enough for the role, and the expectations include everything from talking to stakeholders, to crafting the requirements, to testing, releasing, and doing the telemetry and analyticis. Obviously nobody will have the focus or time to build anything properly this way, and they will always choose to use external libraries instead of making something from scratch that will fit the domain space and will allow full control to build something with no bugs.
It's amazing how the industry has accepted that bugs are normal, and part of building frontends, when good engineering should mean that you are able to build and ship something with almost zero bugs. The industry has changed the role and steered it away from what engineering is supposed to be, which is building things properly, and now people are scratching their heads as to why we have such bad software and everything is so complicated on the frontend.