Building an MVP backend is a lot easier, but there is no limit to how much work you can put into a backend to a typical app. Frontend is a pretty much solved problem, getting to that state takes longer than the backend MVP but after that there isn't that much more to do. Or do you think that reddit, twitter, facebook or google put more work into their frontends than everything that goes on in their backends? Recreating their frontends isn't that much work, recreating their backends however...
Really, this is very dependent on the kind of software you work in and what the focus of that software is. There's a wide world of software out there, with all different kinds of priorities and challenges.
> Really, this is very dependent on the kind of software you work in and what the focus of that software is. There's a wide world of software out there, with all different kinds of priorities and challenges.
That is included in what I said, many projects are fine with an MVP, that is why it is called MVP.
If your frontend is a game or some creator tool like photoshop then they will be complicated, but usually you don't call those frontends, and most frontend developers doesn't have the skills to make such products.
> Found the backend dev.
I've spent roughly equal time in both domains. Creating a frontend with the same quality as Google or Facebook isn't particularly hard (if you assume another guy did the UX design), it is tedious though. And that is basically all you have to be able to do to work as a frontend dev.
This might sound shocking, but there is a lot going on behind the scenes at Facebook, Google, and any big player really, on the frontend. Like, a lot. Think a thousand A/B tests at once. Hundreds of independent products and internal tools. Each one with dozens of minor, but necessary pages that most users will never see. Facebook’s frontend passed 10 million lines of code back in 2013. Someone wrote all of that. Yes, we did that to ourselves…
Most product teams for these companies have more frontend than backend devs. They’re building new features, sometimes multiple versions in parallel, fixing bugs and creating more of them, running experiments, and with modern frameworks, a whole lot of plumbing. You can basically generate infinite amounts of product work, and that’s what companies do.
I don't think so. Just see the progress of frameworks like react/angular etc. over the recent years. We also see concurrency being embraced more. There is still a lot of things to be improved in frontend, I wouldn't call that a solved problem, even though the problem space is narrower than backend/infra.
Those are changes in libraries, not changes in capabilities or what it means for a frontend to be good. How to make a good frontend framework isn't a solved problem, no, but how to make a good frontend is a solved problem. The exception is UX design, but frontend developers typically aren't UX experts, that isn't on their plate.
Problem is, on a FE you cannot simply build an MVP. An MVP would mean black/white colors, no responsive, no design, no styling etc. It would look like shit, even if it could handle all the requirements perfectly. You always want a good looking FE, and it has to work and (continuously) be tested on a wide set of Browsers, Devices and Screen resolutions.
