Funny, most people I’ve talked to said that the backend code usually is better structured and written, while the frontend (web and games) was a hot mess
I recently joined a team that had no backender for a year and the frontenders maintained the backend. In this case the image totally applies.
On the front end, you can put lipstick on that pig.
On the back end, it has to work and there’s nowhere to apply lipstick.
OTOH, it seems there is a trend in modern dev practices that it’s acceptable for a service to terminate frequently, as long as it respawns, which finally made me figure out all the sci-fi tropes where a ship’s systems aren’t responding. It’s because too many are crashing in concert. But mostly terrifying that this practice would ever be considered practical.
Depends who’s coding what. Since fullstack, ick, is the norm, backend coders forced to do frontend is the case that you’ve described. Frontend coders forced to do backend is the case in the comic.
Yeah, that’s my experience. The backend is an environment you control completely and has well-defined inputs and outputs specifically designed to be handled by machines. Front end code changes on a whim, runs who the hell knows where, and has to look good doing it.
Plus for the front most people use very unsafe languages and glued together frameworks (JavaScript, typescript, react, Vue etc), whereas on the backend we can use proper type-safe, compiled languages with better abstractions (rust, scala,…) with proper unit and integration tests.
All the node.js backends reading this rn
My experience has often been that Business mostly cares about what they and their users can directly interact with (The FE) and don’t really care about spending time and effort on the BE
