The quiet, pervasive devaluation of frontend
The quiet, pervasive devaluation of frontend
I keep noticing those of us in the frontend field being treated much the same as nurses, paralegals, and executive assistants. Our work is seen as important, certainly, but just not the same as, or as important as, the “real” work.
An interesting read. Of course just an personal opinion as the author said, but I think he is correct in lots of his points.
I noticed that I think / feel like this myself sometimes, even while I'm a frontend dev myself.
Fortunately I'm in a nice team that values my frontend skills that all the other full stack/ Backend devs are missing.
Did you notice this bias / devaluing of the frontend work yourself?
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I feel for this guy. It's not just frontend though, I've seen it with backend, DBAs, etc. It really is just a reflection of what the business considers valuable.
It's true it happens for other areas too. But I think it might be true that frontend is often viewed as "the easy" part by other devs. Especially older backend devs seem to think it's all super easy. At least in my experience.
And that businesses try to push for all devs be full stack doesn't help.
I'm a "full stack" backend dev - I mainly do backend work, but make minor changes to the frontend, like adding a button to a page that already has 3 other buttons.
I've got a couple of friends who didn't want to do even the occasional front end work and moved to devops. They'd rather deal with k8s and monthly on-call rotations than deal with frontend.
I don't know who gave you the impression that all backend devs think of front end as "easy", but it's definitely not the case, at least in my friend group of n=4. We treat frontend as insane arcane magic and we don't want anything to do with frontend because we find literally everything else easier.
It's definitely not all. My current team definitely has respect for all that special tooling / ux stuff I'm doing. Especially since nobody was able to do it before I was hired.
But I also had the experience that older Backend devs don't take it seriously. My guess would that those stoped learning about frontend tech in the late 90s and it's a case of not knowing what you don't know.