Ask HN: Im back end engineer, not front end – is this just excuse?
When I hear: I'm not good at frontend, I'm good at backend - I'm starting to think this is not true.
If you don't care about the user in the UI, you probably don't care about the user in the backend either. Frontend problems are just easier to see — bad UI, confusing views, ugly design. Everyone notices. Backend problems are hidden — slow API response, bad errors, hard to manage code. It takes longer to notice, but users still suffer. So maybe it's not about frontend vs backend. Maybe it is just about caring (or not caring) about the end user. Have you seen this? > If you don't care about the user in the UI, you probably don't care about the user in the backend either. Not necessarily. I hate frontend tasks not because I don’t care about the user, but because I don’t have decent graphic skills. I can code but I don’t have a good istinct for colors, size, font styles, or other frontend issues that feel more art than science. I’m honest about it, and luckily my job doesn’t involve frontend tasks, but this doesn’t mean that I don’t care about the users. In fact, you could say that I avoid frontend tasks precisely because I care about users and I don’t want them to be tormented by my awful UI choices :) > Frontend problems are just easier to see — bad UI, confusing views, ugly design. Everyone notices. Backend problems are hidden — slow API response, bad errors, hard to manage code That’s one way to see it. Another way is that frontend problems are subjective. The same UI could be confusing for someone and reasonable in someone else’s eyes. What’s ugly? “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”, as the saying goes. Backend problems can be hidden and random but they are objective. If an API returns 500, there is something wrong. It may do so only when a plane passes by or when a cosmic ray happen to flip a bit, but everyone can agree that a 500 is not supposed to happen (unless your API intentionally returns 500 for success…). The root cause may be obscure, but the existence of an issue is objective. > When I hear: I'm not good at frontend, I'm good at backend - I'm starting to think this is not true. There's no absolute true false in anything like that. Generalization is just an easy way to reduce thinking. To take that analogy further - when you go to a specialist (doctor) and get assigned 1 are they the best 1? If you have a different problem do you have to go to a different specialist? So it's not about you. It's about society or your company. You get a job, e.g. backend engineer. That's your "label". It doesn't actually say what you're better at -- just that you were tested for backend by company standards and got in. Many reasons to not want to do front end work, the assumption that it's because the developer doesn't care any the user is entirely unfounded. Just because you think you're good at UI issues doesn't mean you're good at structuring back-end APIs.