[nickthemagicman]

Are you able to fully configure webpack? Do you know how to animate with CSS? Do you know Greensock? Three.js? Babel? The differences between ES5,6,7? Co.js? ES generators? Webassembly?

Being able to hack out a little Js and css to make an Enterprise dashboard imo does not a front end or full stack developer make.

I have one of those 'college degree' thingys and I'll tell you something....imo CORRECT front end development is way more challenging than back end development.

[manigandham]

That's a nice set of buzzwords but nothing complicated. Babel is just a transpiler. ES versions are like any other programming language with versions, use Babel to solve. ES generators are just yield functions that have been around for decades and finally getting to JS. What about webassembly? It's just a compilation target for other languages and delivery format for the browser.

And why is configuring webpack always mentioned as a complicated thing? If you can code all the above then why cant you make a simple javascript app return an object following a schema with an input, output and list of loaders?

[nickthemagicman]

Of course! Databases are just more complicated spreadsheets! And puppet is just scripts that configure servers. And encryption is just a few math equations that mask data.

Man when you put it that way I just realized how trivial all technology is!

Really anyone can do it without years of experience and training!

Who knows why the salaries are so high!

[manigandham]

I'm not sure what the point of your comment is, but the large number of 3 month bootcamps that create frontend devs does seem to show that anyone can do it.

I'm calling out the fact that the things you mentioned and the concepts behind them are not unique to frontend and certainly not even that complex. All it means is that the frontend landscape is finally catching up to traditional backend languages and dev practices. We've had compilers, multiple language versions, and environment targets for a long time. We've had functional programming, event sourcing, actor systems, immutable data, and materialized views for a long time. We've used DSLs and full programming languages to create config objects and execution paths for a long time. We've had async and multithreaded programming for a long time.

None of this is new or suddenly challenging, which goes to the original point of this thread that backend skills tend to move much easier to current frontend dev than the opposite direction because of what's involved. I'm not sure how much backend experience you have, if any, but naming assorted buzzwords and claiming that configuring webpack is complex only seems to reinforce my comments.

[nickthemagicman]

Actually making things happen with the technologies is alot different than being able to spout general principles on how they work on the internet.

Your trivialization of these technologies makes me think you're possibly a first/second year computer science student who's never actually worked with any of them and mainly read a modern javascript overview page on the web or a rundown in a textbook. Or just a troll!

[manigandham]

Ok... but again, what does that have to do with frontend vs backend which is what this thread is about?

The concepts define the complexity, and my point is that they are nothing new so why would frontend be harder when it's only catching up to backend environments? No amount of buzzwords changes that.

[olavgg]

There is no "correct" front end development. You need to say no or stop to all the noise coming from everywhere.

[nickthemagicman]

You're saying there's no best practices? No lessons learned from a decade of front end development. That seems inaccurate to me.

[mixmastamyk]

Incidental vs. essential complexity.