Frontend engineering meaningful?
Do you feel like your work as a frontend engineer is meaningful and impactful enough towards the product you are building? I feel like in most companies BE work is treated as more important. Most of your performance bottlenecks and production issues would also be related to Backend and hence those who work on it get more visibility. I feel as an FE all my work is being limited till the feature is being developed and after that you just move to the next one. Kinda feeling bad about it.
Me - a full stack dev who finds both of them to be meaningless. Just like my life.
NanOrNull
Stealth
a year ago
Kadwa satya
BabuBhaiya
Stealth
a year ago
I have been working in the core frontend for the past 2 years for a fintech product. In many places you'll find api calls being made and then it renders the data on screen. No big deal, it doesn't update in realtime nor has much user interaction.
But as soon as you start building a product that involves a lot of realtime data coming through sockets or need to derive a lot of values and sync states between several screen/components. Difficulty increases as you keep on building.
You need efficient updates and responsive ui otherwise you'll lose out on business or get angry customers.
Apart from this you need to ensure your screen loads quickly and show correctly across several screen sizes/orientation, following user preferences also it's accessible. If your page web vitals are not good enough it can impact your web ranking.
This is just a small part of FE. Being able to come up with proper routing/consistent components and abstractions itself is a task.
Backend folks are equally important without a doubt, they have their own issues.
Regarding features as you mentioned, it gets developed and you move on to the next. That's not always the case. Product team might keep on improving or add some other functionality in the same feature which could have a broader impact on overall logic. What if the same components are being rendered upon different screens? It increases complexity.
uname_cannot_be_null
Stealth
a year ago
Yeah but most FE work in startups are just what you mention on your first part of the answer. Its just a api call and render data. And its speed of execution which matters the most so no much thought to interactions, animations and stuff.
Perf mostly comes last. Frameworks already make it a lot faster. Usual bottleneck is BE.
BearBear
Stealth
a year ago
I work in a small startup but what you said about performance is totally false in my case. Here the team is small, and I have around 1+yoe but the PR reviews are so hard here and also first before that your code has to pass through Sonar cloud. The amount of bugs we solve and improvement of the existing UI and the number of tickets QA team gives us is humongous and tbh few days back I redesigned the existing home page and things were not as easy as it seems. Api integration isn't as easy as you said, the level of abstraction we do while using Thunk is good enough for our case. Just to give you an example, we create constants, we register endpoints, we create api call methods, then we create Thunk api call method where we use this service method of API and the constants we created from there we have written our own custom Thunk processing way. After this you get the response. To store the response you need to create a state and maintain it. And also when you are dispatching actions you need to make sure the api calls aren't affecting anything else. Sometimes it makes the lage load slow. So then we need to cache the results and functions using useMemo for calculations and functions using useCallback. Sometimes you need to make another api call in the callback and then you need to redirect to a different page and there you need to get those states and again do a lot of stuff. I know there are modern ways to do this using RTK as well and also using Redux Toolkit which uses immer.js for state updates. But how will you replace an existing system of code. There are tech debts but you already have so much work that you don't have time to revisit those bottlenecks. Things stop working and you'll later find out that the api call was not working and again you need to dig deep down and find why this isn't happening. So there are things which aren't simple and I haven't worked with Sockets which seems even tougher to me after reading his comments. Nothing is simple in tech!
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Add Typescript on top of it to make your life living hell. (I know and having been using typescript since Angular 2(7 version) 2016.
I am still perfect and more productive without it if we measure development experience and build time across the year. And its only for dev's and not for customers.
Still, it has become mandatory in JD's and interviews since 2022.
On top of it, TDD has slowly become a norm in US based good companies, expect unit, e2e, A/B testing.
FE is deep shit complex lately!
I dont expect to start TS vs JS useless debate. Kindly dont comment on it. šš
Offerer
Stealth
a year ago
I'll still comment.
TS isn't there to improve your productivity. It is there for long term management of code where developers come and go.
Good luck managing a js codebase written by a thousand developers over 10 years and tell me how many WTF you spit.
TS = free documentation that validates your code strictly so that you don't have write trivial test cases like data type validation.
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Offerer
Stealth
a year ago
Think of building interfaces like figma, photoshop or very interactive UIs and then compare it to BE. It becomes equally complex. Even more.
Been in FE for 8 years and I still get intimidated thinking how the hell would one develop a tool like figma that works so flawlessly in browser.
uname_cannot_be_null
Stealth
a year ago
Yes. I agree. A large part is c++ i think. Only some parts use the frontend trio.
Depends the way you see it. If the website animations and performance is slow and ux isnt great.... BE's and the backend can go to hell.
If the website look and feel aint good, no online business can run... no matter how well the engg and business models are in place.
User ll just close that browser tab and never come back!
uname_cannot_be_null
Stealth
a year ago
Yes i agree. Although there are very few such sitesi think. Most products i ever used were well designed on UX front, good usability and perf due to the frameworks. Even those products if we see source code it will be the same api call and render data.
There was a time in Orkut (if you heard), pasting a piece of 3 line javascript code on the browser url will identity the images on the page and make them rotate in a infinite loop. Can't see anyone wrote a similar code for Facebook or twitter. Challenge is what you make and take out of your work.
It would be challenging now due to all the abstractions introduced by 1 million JavaScript frameworks, bundlers, package managers, transpilers and what not.
uname_cannot_be_null
Stealth
a year ago
Interesting. I did not know this. I only saw my friend's orkut page once in a cyber cafe where we could not go usually.
uname_cannot_be_null
Stealth
a year ago
Haha "React Developer"
DalleKhorsani
Stealth
a year ago
It gets boring after one point. But, I think it happens for a backend engineer too. I was also stuck in the component creation rut for like 5-6 months. Just moved to a backend role. I have YOE:1.3 btw.
I'm planning to move to MANG in 5-6 months - once I complete 2YOE. Hopefully there they'll give a fuck about deeper problems of engineering a product.
If you wanna connect on discord: @dallekhorsani
uname_cannot_be_null
Stealth
a year ago
Good for you. Keep exploring.
BinaryBillionaire
Stealth
a year ago
Itās greatly relatable! Being in frontend development since 6years now.. and trust me I had asked this same question to myself hundreds of times during the initial years of my career and always thought to pivot to backed dev.
But, after switching into a product company.. I see why Frontend dev is not just calling APIs and show data!
Look at all the marvellous and awesome websites people create! When you are creating a webapp that needs to be scalable that is processing millions of realtime data every single minute.. then its no more just api calls!
Think again.. you know Frontend dev is much more than that
Well uāll be more recognized by non tech as at the end thatās what they interact with. But ya I get what u mean. You might find that meaning in frontend heavy companies otherwise itās just an ordinary job - someoneās gotta do it
uname_cannot_be_null
Stealth
a year ago
Yeah i have started to think maybe this is it. There is no glory in this field. I am not sure what in FE would be comparable to BE Making an api which scales to million users might or fixing a core perf issue which increases response times by 10x.
OverdueTrim
Stealth
a year ago
The user only sees your front-end, doesn't care about whether you used horizontal or vertical scaling. I enjoy FE work and have now spent 16 years of my career doing it and currently lead a team of FE engineers because I'm passionate about great looking user interfaces. I suggest you find a stream of work that you're passionate about as well.
uname_cannot_be_null
Stealth
a year ago
Yeah. Idk, i am just too bored of it after 4 yrs. Most companies i worked for only wanted quick products. No such challenging animations, micro interactions etc if thats what u mean by beautiful UI.
Brutallyhonest
Stealth
a year ago
No scope.
uname_cannot_be_null
Stealth
a year ago
Can you elaborate?
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