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Comment by Grumbledour | Hacker News Reader

In addition to that, as someone who has worked in web for quite a while I also find it quite baffling that the to me mostly artificial separation of frontend and backend devs has led to programmers who can only do one of them.

Sure, everyone has a specialty, but writing frontend and knowing not one line of SQL or how to structure a database or working in the backend but not knowing a bit of HTML or CSS or how to configure a web server, these examples just seem like bad programmers?

You don't need to know everything, but surely you should know enough the have an idea of the system as a whole? How can you avoid doing shoddy work otherwise?

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I personally have very little idea (read: no idea) of iOS & android development. As in, I have no idea what the execution model is there, how the OS libraries/APIs/ABIs are structured, how storage works (sqlite on both I think...?)

I trust our iOS & android devs though that if I speak to them about an API and we agree on a specification, that they are sure it can be implemented cleanly & efficiently on their side. But yeah, that requires an abstract understanding of computing as a whole, and good comms.

FWIW I wouldn't consider myself full-stack by any stretch :P

Front-end work today seems less like "knowing a bit of HTML or CSS" and more like "knowing a bit about these 5 competing front-end JavaScript frameworks" (and that list changes every few years).

But that's just the perspective of someone firmly wedded to the backend.

The list of competing frameworks hasn't really changed in a long long time. And often people have to know only one of them to have a very stable frontend career, and 99% of the time it is one of the top 3 (React/Vue/Angular). These 3 have been staples for what, 7, 8 years now?

What React is capable of hasn't really changed (code from back then will still work), but recommendations in that whole ecosystem have changed so massively in that time it can look like 2-3 different frameworks depending on what era it's from.

Angular is a total rewrite of AngularJS, that as far as I know is incompatible with the original (no firsthand experience, going off what I remember others saying about it). It was first released ~6 years ago, while AngularJS's last release was ~2 years ago.

No comments on Vue, never used it and I don't hear about it as much as the others.

Angular 2+ is almost six years old at this point too, and the devs who knew v1 still could use it perfectly. And people did successfully migrate back then. And for real: this is "a framework that got a breaking change between major versions". If that’s the worst example we have, I would say the JS ecosystem is doing jolly fine! I've had worst breaking changes in backend frameworks, to be honest.

About the other two: like you said, both React and Vue can still run old code, almost unmodified. The track record of those two is way better than most backend frameworks, by miles. It’s not even a fair fight.

Sure there's new concepts, but it's not arbitrary stuff or old patterns, it's legitimate stuff that makes writing UIs better. But the old ways are still there too.

You could make the same strawman argument in the backend world.

Backend work today seems less like "knowing a bit of SQL and PHP" and more like "knowing a bit about these 5 competing new programming languages".

I find it frustrating when my clients employees actively refuse to dive deeper because they "don't know how/I'm not experienced enough", well, then it's your job to figure it out, that's why they pay you money.

As long as most of us are "just" implementing bog standard web frontends and bog standard backends using some sort of SQL, then I find there's no excuse for not being able to pick up the slack, if you're asked to.

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