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The difficulty is different. Front-end is very capricious, idiosyncratic, inconsistent. You have to deal with lots of annoyances, puzzles. You still might have some connectivity responsibilities, like restoring a web socket connection, managing local storage, integrating 3rd party SDKs. But frontend doesn't need to deal with as many categories of failure modes as backend (imagine running out of file handles in *nix OS, or dealing with a deteriorating hard drive), doesn't need to worry about security to the same extent, and doesn't need to scale to many users. You know that you're running on a single machine, in (usually) a single thread. If you got it to work in all target devices, and handled low connectivity conditions, you're probably good. On the backend, you might get it to work, but that's just step one. Now you have to make sure it's secure, make sure you handle all weird thread safety edge cases, db deadlocks from connection limits, and make it scale, which can take you very far from what you had when you just made it work. Running a feature at scale is an entirely different beast than making a feature work. Every backend function can turn into an iceberg of code, databases, queues, and other infrastructure to facilitate that feature. |