Yea, fair enough. My point was mostly: backend requirements are usually at least objective. “Json xml comes in”, “CSV goes out by email”, “The request must be processed under 100 ms”, “API should not return 400 on feetpics” - these are still mostly objective requirements.
Frontend requirements can be very subjective “The user should have a great user experience with the frontend”
Hahaha that’s what frontend devs think, but the backend requirements are just as vague: “Just make this button work”. In my example all the requirements would actually be figured out bit by bit over months, nevermind the prescience required to foresee future architecture-breaking features or scaling requirements. At least you can make a mockup and get instant feedback, flawed as it is.
On either side it takes experienced engineers to suss out actual requirements from customers/PMs. The main difference is that the backend (especially on the infra/devops side) is only accountable to itself if everything goes well, but ironically that means no-one knows or cares about the amount of engineering that goes into keeping PMs blissfully ignorant of the risks and complexity.
Hahah, well as a primarily backend developer, that’s what I think as well.
“Just make this button work”
If that button doesn’t work, that sounds like a frontend problem to me… ;)
But yea, as you mentioned, it probably comes down to experience. As the meme from this post depicts. When I dabble in frontend and make a WinForm for my devtool, people just look at me and are like “Uhhh, can you make it better?”
No sir, clearly I can not. And I have no idea what you mean with “better”.
Yea, fair enough. My point was mostly: backend requirements are usually at least objective. “Json xml comes in”, “CSV goes out by email”, “The request must be processed under 100 ms”, “API should not return 400 on feetpics” - these are still mostly objective requirements.
Frontend requirements can be very subjective “The user should have a great user experience with the frontend”
Hahaha that’s what frontend devs think, but the backend requirements are just as vague: “Just make this button work”. In my example all the requirements would actually be figured out bit by bit over months, nevermind the prescience required to foresee future architecture-breaking features or scaling requirements. At least you can make a mockup and get instant feedback, flawed as it is.
On either side it takes experienced engineers to suss out actual requirements from customers/PMs. The main difference is that the backend (especially on the infra/devops side) is only accountable to itself if everything goes well, but ironically that means no-one knows or cares about the amount of engineering that goes into keeping PMs blissfully ignorant of the risks and complexity.
Hahah, well as a primarily backend developer, that’s what I think as well.
If that button doesn’t work, that sounds like a frontend problem to me… ;)
But yea, as you mentioned, it probably comes down to experience. As the meme from this post depicts. When I dabble in frontend and make a WinForm for my devtool, people just look at me and are like “Uhhh, can you make it better?”
No sir, clearly I can not. And I have no idea what you mean with “better”.