And yet, I can build world scale cloud systems but can’t build a web front end anymore to save my life.
I’m blown away by the sheer complexity that has evolved in frontend code. Developers there have such a broad toolset and arcane knowledge about how you really need to combine two CSS traits on surrounding containers to get the positioning you want.
Unfortunately, in our industry, most engineers think the layer above theirs is a trivial composition of parts
And Rube Goldberg machines are engineering marvels, but we shouldn't laud the engineer who builds one to transport a part from here to there when a "simple" conveyor belt does the job just fine.
How much of that complexity was necessary? How much of it was chosen to boost someone's CV?
I mean a lot of the complexity in the front end has arisen from the need of the business to provide more feature full experiences, not because some developer thought he could pad his CV. Developers aren't developing complicated front ends to pad CVs, they are developing complicated front ends because the business needs it to solve certain problems.
I agree that the frontend landscape is too complex, but much of that is self imposed. Most developers on the client side refuse to string two lines of code together without a framework or large abstraction library. Offers of reducing complexity such as removing unnecessary decoration in the code or returning to a standards driven approach is often met with hostility. Much of this complexity is the result of striving for comfort and easiness. Simplicity isn’t easy.
I’m blown away by the sheer complexity that has evolved in frontend code. Developers there have such a broad toolset and arcane knowledge about how you really need to combine two CSS traits on surrounding containers to get the positioning you want.
Unfortunately, in our industry, most engineers think the layer above theirs is a trivial composition of parts