Ask HN: Why are front end developers (esp React) in such high demand in 2022?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32635367

by pbowyer • 4 years ago

28 39 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What's made frontend developers be in such high demand in 2022? And particularly React developers?

Rates are up and companies are finding it difficult to hire people. Why this year?

Ambolia2• 4 years ago

I would say that Frontend development in general (HTML+CSS) and the whole javascript ecosystem are a nightmare of patches on top of other patches, and endless exceptions and small components whose sole job is to plug some hole from a different technology under it. You need endless people and bruteforce to build on it and provide more value for the end user.

In comparison, Backend can turn bad sometimes, but a well designed, small Backend component can produce endless value and easy extensibility. I've never seen anything similar in Frontend.

shakes_mcjunkie3• 4 years ago

As a frontend dev there are definitely well designed frontends. I've seen a lot of bad backends too. It just depends on how much engineers are able to plan ahead and also keep tech debt under control.

Ambolia2• 4 years ago

I would say it's not so much about good or bad design, and more about which kinds of decisions, how many moving parts, and what consequences they have down the line. Like on backend you will have a choice of database, choice of language, and the design of the Schema/API, most of which are easy to detach and replace at some point.

While on Frontend from the beginning, specially i you are working with a team, you will have to make a lot of small decisions that can cause all kinds of trouble down the line:

- How you build the project, javascript transpilers and all that mess.

- Decide a CSS framework, or not use a framework and then decide on an internal style guide.

- Decide on a component library.

- Decide on how to handle state.

Or you can skip those above and use pure HTML+CSS+Javascript, but those usually end up as very spaguettified and idiosyncratic projects, I rarely see anyone even considering it unless it's a personal project. And for a good reason, the structure provided by component and state handling libraries reduces a lot of the inherent chaos that is structuring frontend web project. But each of those also comes with its own bag of new problems, and complexity that requires the developers to handle a lot of disparate information in their heads while working on a project.

akudha• 4 years ago

I dunno, I’d rather take a bad backend codebase than a bad front end codebase.

My job is moving completely to JS stack. The number of steps to build, number of packages to install, the cryptic errors… it is just depressing. Not to mention the resource hogging - we had to upgrade to 32GB RAM just to be able to do the basic stuff.

Maybe there are better ways to do JS that doesn’t suck this much. I dunno. I just wish I could write just backend code. Python, PHP etc have their shortcomings, but none of them are as annoying as JS

everforward• 4 years ago

The differentiating factor to me is that backends can typically define the runtime they want to use, while frontends are beholden to run on what the user brings.

A backend from a decade or two ago can still run fine, because it defines what it runs on. It doesn't matter if CentOS 5 deprecated a feature the apps needs, we can run it on a CentOS 4 VM (not that anyone should).

Frontend feels like it has more churn because it can't define it's own runtime. If Chrome deprecates a feature, frontends have to adapt to that. Because frontends have to adapt to their runtime changing, it becomes important to use a framework that's currently supported. You can't keep running on Java applets, because browsers won't run them anymore. You can't keep running on RandomJSFramework if it stops getting updates, because features may get deprecated in the browser.

I think it has less to do with the average frontend vs backend dev, and more to do with the environment they operate in.

durnygbur• 4 years ago

More experienced devs are burning out and signing off from this crazy town. People after bootcamps trying to enter the market and making this carousel to spin even faster. Companies are looking specifically for Angular/React developers.

Raed667• 4 years ago

There are 3 aspects in my opinion:

1- Companies understanding that a good user-interface is a must for their product. HN crowd are known for being anti-JavaScript, but modern web-apps are incredibly powerful and useful. This means you can't make your back-end developer glue together a JSP and call it a day anymore. So front-end overall is in high demand.

2- React helped standardize the way we do front-end. Yes Svelt, Vue and Solid are all great. But the ecosystem and the ability to hire from a large pool of talent without needing to train developers on your niche stack is a huge benefit.

3- React is easy to start, hard to master. When interviewing you'll likely be seeing a 10:1 ratio of boot-camp grads vs developers who have dealt with complex React apps at scale. This means an experienced React developer can ask for a higher salary.

beingflo• 4 years ago

Full agree. And further I think frontend complexity has grown quite a bit lately. People love to go on about framework churn etc. when it's just a difficult domain in general. As someone who used to have snobbish opinions on frontend work, I've completely come around since diving into it. For modern fullstack applications I believe the frontend often has more complexity to it than the backend.

fullstackchris2• 4 years ago

Of course it does. The entire concept of 'state' doesn't even exist on the backend (okay, outside the concept of a user session, but then that barely adds any complexity; perhaps you use the user's ID and that's it). Frontend you've got to think about async calls, which automatically brings three states: loading, success, and error. You may have multiple of these calls and each combination of all of them leads to some crazy complex rendering. It's turtles all the way down if you're a junior (or to be honest, just a lazy dev), it's very easy to make a mess and abuse a library as flexible as React.

From my experience the better you can compose your components, the happier you'll be. And there's nearly always a dead simple way to design something even if from the outside the functionality seems very complex, like this for example: https://codesandbox.io/s/react-text-highlight-2h0kvu?file=/s...

JustLurking2022• 4 years ago

Funnily, I find one reason React gets adopted is that it looks the most like traditional desktop application UI programming, which is a benefit to large companies with workforces full of people who have written such apps in the past. It's only after you've already committed that you find out it doesn't get you out of needing to understand HTML and state persistence.

dt2m4• 4 years ago

A lot of organizations bet the farm on React ~5 years ago because it was the cool new thing. It is very likely that many of the original developers have since moved on to the next cool new thing, and now companies need maintenance work done on their (now unwieldy) codebase.

Another reason: The trend today seems to be to offload most of the data processing to the client side, only using the server as a glorified database pipe. Naturally, this results in a higher demand for frontend development.

rozenmd• 4 years ago

Except the cool new thing is still React, and we're all still here.

Folks are building products with great UX -> Clients use these products, want the same thing in their products -> Demand for frontend increases, repeat.

pcthrowaway2• 4 years ago

React is still in, but it's definitely not the "cool new thing" now. Svelte and Solidjs seem to be the "cool new things" now on the front-end

dt2m4• 4 years ago

There's no question that it's still highly in demand, but as a user I despise React apps. Not that there's anything wrong with the technology - well-written React with minimal dependencies can provide a great and responsive UX.

In practise this rarely is the case. I have yet to use a React app that consistently respects Cmd+click as my intent to open something in a new tab, has sub-100ms draw times for any UI action, and doesn't need to load multiple megabytes of JS to bog down my CPU for basic CRUD stuff.

presentation2• 4 years ago

The new new trend is to offload processing to the edge.

dirslashls• 4 years ago

Would love to see any factual references about the trend. It's in my vested interested as a founder of sqlframes.com

hulitu• 4 years ago

Memory is cheap.

65102• 4 years ago

Devs are using expensive computers now to build the html files. An added benefit is that the website now runs supper fast - so they think.

mouzogu• 4 years ago

i think the high demand is more for full stack "react/typescript/nextjs/graphql...." developers with experience building real world high scale apps.

batmanturkey• 4 years ago

Building UI is labor intensive. It involves a lot of functionality: the layout and display style of elements, binding those elements to data inputs and data display, and has to manage sending and receiving data from the server as well as possibly updating the “page” and it’s element’s outside of a page load cycle.

Unfortunately for the way we use the web, the frontend is not simply some two-way bound GUI, but is rather a remote folder browsing application that explicitly was initially designed with the page-load (or reload) as the only explicit mechanism for synchronization of state between the client and the server.

thatgerhard• 4 years ago

The same thing that happened when we got flash the 1st time.. account/project managers see thing can move so they they make everything move...

paxys• 4 years ago

This isn't unique to frontend or React. All developers are in high demand, and have been for over a decade.

GirishSharma643• 4 years ago

But how it concluded that front end developers (esp React) are in high demand, any facts/data please?

kevincox• 4 years ago

I think the vast majority of websites and apps are not "technically complex". The backend is generally close to a CRUD with a small amount of "special sauce". This makes UX the defining feature for most projects. This means that for the "average" company you will need more frontend than backend developers. React is by far the most popular frontend framework right now and provides a valuable lingua franca which provides a large talent pool.

swah• 4 years ago

Wait, where are those jobs? Are we in a recession or not?

frozencell• 4 years ago

"They" (IMF, etc.) seem exactly to know what they are doing but I don't know exactly what yet.

nivertech• 4 years ago

Everyone does React because everyone else does React.

One company built an SPA in React, even though they have a handful of internal users and the app runs inside the corporate network.

There is an ultrahigh velocity of software rot in the FE/JS ecosystem.

Imagine Facebook releasing a next big WebAssembly+Rust-based framework, and now everyone will be either stuck with React, or will need to rewrite.

The market chooses the path to inflict the maximum damage/loss.

Ask HN: Why are front end developers (esp React) in such high demand in 2022?

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