[tracker1]

I'm currently working in a team on a MEAN-stack project... it's less than 6 months old, and feels like it was made 6+ years ago. I've met a lot of resistance in terms of getting Webpack and Babel introduced... I've never been a fan of ng's dependency injection system, it always felt like cjs's require (combined with browserify/webpack) is cleaner.

I know these tools are fairly new... that said, working without them feels like developing web applications back in the late 90's. Just painful.

I've interviewed for a few positions where Java is used on the backend, and because of my strong front end and JS experience the assumption is that I won't be able to keep up on the backend. It's pretty ridiculous, when the opposite assumptions never seem to present themselves. I've worked with multiple database systems, and multiple server-side architectures. Just avoided Java because every time I've used it, it just felt excessively painful to use.

I've said for the past few years (ever since Prototype, then jQuery) that one should be looking for solid developers with the ability to learn, try and adapt over someone with a checkbox skill. Yes, you'll be hard pressed to find a developer with "solid React experience." The point is that hiring a solid developer is hard, but that should be the primary goal.

[aphextron]

>I know these tools are fairly new... that said, working without them feels like developing web applications back in the late 90's. Just painful

Large scale Javascript development is an absolute nightmare without TypeScript

[tracker1]

If you're using feature based project structure, it really isn't bad. Typescript doesn't offer that much over modern JS development with webpack.

[ilaksh]

MEAN is actually pretty outdated. More like React and RethinkDB and a million other things.

But yeah, having had all three roles, back-end is often much easier than front-end or full-stack, despite the false sense of superiority that back-end only devs have.

Also having done C# for several years as well as JavaScript, Java/C# type languages are overall easier than JavaScript because you get things like intellisense, static type checking etc. from the compiler.

[tracker1]

I agree on C# being easier overall, but I find less disconnect with node.js on the server when JS is the client. It's usually the structure of Java/C# type projects that tends to get to me more than anything... just more complicated than it should be.