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

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.

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

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.

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...

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

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.