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Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

I thought the same a few years ago, when I moved to backend development. I don't feel like the backend was that different, in terms of setting up infrastructure.

In hindsight, I just didn't enjoy writing code for money. When I left my last programming job, I started programming for fun again. It wasn't a deliberate effort, but something that happened on its own.

If you program for fun, you don't have to learn anything. You don't have to use webpack or SCSS if you don't want to. You don't need to write tests. "oops" is a valid commit message and "bugger off" is a valid response to stakeholders.

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My advice to anyone that starts off loving code: focus on maximizing your revenue, minimizing your cost, and be careful with your commitments. One day you will hate working with these damn machines, and it isn't the machine but everything else.

My target goal is to retire soon-ish, and I'll dick around with my own stupid programming language around board games: http://www.adama-lang.org/

I don't intend to rally stake-holders about it.

I fully expect to tinker on this for a decade without any love, and that's just fine with me.

I don't intend to defend my decisions, or justify why this thing exists.

Now I make home-cooked apps [1]. I think you'll like this article.

[1] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

The few backend devs I've talked to have agreed that the world spins a bit slower in the back-end side of things, without having weekly "chapter meetings" to discuss how the code we wrote last week is now obsolete. Backend devs are also much more versed in writing decent, performant code, to my experience - whereas the majority of front-end devs I've worked with have no idea why you should try to avoid writing loops in loops. But of course, everything can be bad, and it also varies from org to org, so here's to hoping my first back-end role won't suck because otherwise I'd be pretty sad.

When React and Angular became popular I realized with great sadness that I was no longer a full stack dev and that I would never ever be one again. There's a whole group of us at work. The young devs laugh at our front-end abilities but they also look up to us because of our ability to elegantly hide our loops within loops within loops, with Linq.

I haven't seen a performant LOB app in years.

My last frontend job was a few years ago, but I'm still writing VueJS apps the same way I used to. I don't feel like anything has really changed since then. I just got better at using the same tools.

The only meaningful change from my perspective is that browsers can do more things.

Backend is nice because you have greater control over the environment, and because testing data flows is easier than testing user interfaces. However, I was not a big fan of devops and cloud stuff, which felt too abstract to me.

Slower perhaps, but it has definitely accumulated its share of complexity and ceremony along the way.

Much of it is basic CRUD, built on top of a tower of complexity, crammed into a container and served by whatever cloud provider.

I spend most of my time plugging and praying/crying.

My work feels like 5% analysis, 5% writing algorithms, 20% writing boilerplate code, 70% integration with some complex ill-documented monstrosity and debugging.

The Kubernetes ecosystem is proof that backend engineers are perfectly capable of overcomplicating things too, thank you very much.

You can still deploy stuff on a plain application server or whatever. The tools I've worked with haven't really required touching any kind of cluster management or other overhyped (albeit in some cases necessary) and complicated backend stuff if you didn't want to. (My backend experience is with Java and Python, though. I don't know how things are with other backend languages.)

When I started looking into putting together a simple but modern frontend in my own time after having done only backend for years, it seemed like there's quite a lot of tooling and associated complexity that you kind of have to deal with just to get your frontend deployed, whether you need a complex architecture or not.

> "oops" is a valid commit message and "bugger off" is a valid response to stakeholders.

I'm thinking about making a T-shirt with this phrase. Because it's important.

I would buy

me too.

Go ahead, I hereby release it under a CC0 licence

> "bugger off" is a valid response to stakeholders.

Sometimes "bugger off" is a valid response to stakeholders, even in a professional context: you just have to know how to say it.

I really started to feel like, after three and a half years, I was succeeding the other day when one of my product managers told a stakeholder to bugger off and they did without even challenging it.

> In hindsight, I just didn't enjoy writing code for money.

This is the almost inevitable path of those who started their career thinking: how lucky am I that my hobby coincides with a well paying job.

It's something I was willing go sacrifice to avoid doing something else that paid worse.

> I just didn't enjoy writing code for money

I think you've touched on something essential here. It may explain the continuous appeal of open source.

Maybe it also explains how even though work is perpetually exhausting, somehow I still find energy to work on side projects, just so I can feel some uninhibited creativity.

I'm also reminded of a cynical quote from my dad. When I was young I asked him "Was work fun?" to which he responded "If work was fun they wouldn't pay you."

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