Ask HN: Why so few front end positions? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why so few front end positions?

6 pointsphyller2 comments

It seems like there are very few job postings for exclusive front end development positions. Many postings are for back end or full stack developers. Is the market saturated with front end developers, or do managers just not want front end developers, or am I looking in the wrong places?

I work exclusively as a front end developer on a large web app. It is very technically challenging. Our team has been growing but every dev that we have added has needed to be trained basically from scratch for front end work. Even supposedly full stack staff engineers with a decade of experience. A pure front end dev is literally 10x more efficient, and the technologies we use these days are just as complex as back end tech (if not more complex, and not saying that is a good thing). Are front end devs not valued, or not needed?

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Front and back end have re-diverged. Years ago we had event driven UI and OS provided widget toolkits. It was less artistic but more efficient than the web for the longest time. Front end development wasn't a position. Instead, companies had designers for advertisements.

Until recently you needed a decent amount of artistic skills to style a website and make it look nice. This is where front end work was important. Now we have many standard toolkit UI libraries to choose from like bootstrap, foundation, electron etc...

It's taken a lot of the artistic side out of making websites, but websites are more like programs now and economics dictate that function is more important than looking cool.

However, since the web also replaced advertising, companies have totally split their sites between WebApp and advertising site now. The frontend dev is still in demand for the advertising side where a unique look is important. These jobs are mostly WordPress.

The front and back end dev jobs will continue to merge as the frameworks get better and the chasm between WebApp and website grows. Front end has become a designer job for advertising platform sites, that's why more and more jobs are "full stack". I doubt your assertion that front end devs are more productive, especially because the technologies being used there now are so similar to back end work. For anyone using Node they're the same.

Yeah - there's tons of jobs. I think you're looking in the wrong place. I just looked at Indeed and put in "front end" and there are 22,886 results :)

I think they are broken down more systematically when titled. You might find something advertising "rails or MEAN stack" or whatever you are working with.

Front end is complexed because it has backend baked into it, so it safe to say that front end is not "just as complexed" or "if not more". That's a stretch.

Rather than invent the wheel, I will just copy a quota comment....because it has good language...

https://www.quora.com/Is-It-true-that-backend-developers-do-...

Yes. Simply because the environment is wider. On the front end it's all about the browser, and occasionally REST API calls.

On the back end it's database and the languages around that, server-side platform and the languages around that, often lots of 3rd party integration (to produce clean and useful REST services for the front end) and the languages and APIs around that, and more. It is a more complex set of abstract concepts that must be integrated into a seamless system.

It's not that front-end isn't difficult or important. It is. And it's absolutely critical to the success of the project. It is just lower in complexity than back-end because it's a smaller environment space.

Hope that's helpful.

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