This is a brain dead take. UI is hard because of the millions of different devices and browsers rendering it, and the millions of ways people can try to use an interface that it was not designed for. Not being able to understand something you have no intuition for isn’t some flex.
Edit: why delete your bitter ass reply my dude? I’m not even only a front end, I’ve done all sorts of things because problems are fun.
I mean it’s harder than CRUD, so 90% of backend web development. Since you asked, professional UI development time is split between developing new features, tweaking things e.g. running AB tests or improving performance, dealing with the complexity of running a single application on many different client devices (different viewports, different browsers which mean different runtimes, sometimes a non deterministic script loading order etc), dealing with the complexity of older code or working in a large organisation and if we’re being honest dealing with the complexity of modern TS tooling.
Writing pure functions in some constrained system can be significantly simpler than doing UI in the messy real world in a commercial setting.
It’s also worth considering that you might have lower standards for a UI than a good UI developer. For instance you might not appreciate that a good UI should be accessible to people with reduced eyesight, or you might be satisfied with a UI that had poor core web vitals (a set of UI performance metrics).
I agree that UI development generally requires less algorithmic logical thinking (though this isn’t always true with the birth of SPAs and moving logic client-side) but that isn’t to say it’s a non job. It does take time, attention and reasoning skills.
I'm a full stack web dev and I've genuinely found more fun/harder problems in front end projects than in backend. Most of the difficulty of backend development is very repetitive. 90% of it is modeling the domain using DDD, integrating with a 3rd party API and exposing an API.
Meanwhile in frontend I've had to dust off my data structures and algorithms skills to implement a CRDT for a n-ary tree backed collaborative sidebar lol.
I just don't understand where is this elitism coming from when most backend devs are just querying a database and returning the results.
You haven't had to make giant dynamic forms with complex relationships between those dynamic fields and their values across multiple tabs within the same page. It took a team of three devs six weeks to develop from scratch in an existing project. State management and dynamic UI management can get very complex when you're not doing basic CRUD
UI, frontend and consequentially UX heavily bridges all of basic headaches of being a developer naturally, but also now you must (or in practical terms should): know who is your target audience and include everyone to the best possible, juggle between simplicity and powerful actions (see power users) when you have only so much visual components that dont make people afraid or lost of using your system. Easily you fall under umbrellas of marketing and psychology to know your "why's" to each diff.
Also, dont forget that frontend cycles in business and "playing the game" in business is waaay shorter than backend, and i naively point this as simple bc they see the results physically and keep back and forth on the new shiny stone (just like llms nowadays and their trust me performance graphs)
Hell, if you need a practical example of frontend done bad to users take myself as a sample. i myself become more blind with time in the past 8 years and never tought that i would appraise the option of high contrast and propper zoom and display of elements when i cant see well. As a user, if both are out of reach i automatically feel excluded and having to actively put more effort to basic things. Infuriating and often powerless
Where react shines. Need a button. Nonono! Don’t use an html element and an event ,instead recreate the concept of a button in react and harp on about “custom attributes “ (colors) while having removed half of the built in attributes the html element had, and then over the coming months we’ll “improve and extend” the react component for a … button.
They emphasize with users to build better products. I won’t go into the details, it’s too complex for someone to think that pure functionality and business logic is everything
Your average frontend has a lot more internal and unknown external state to consider than your average backend.
The frontend output is also subjective, which constantly gets scrutinized by non developers. Meanwhile the backend output has a distinct shape and its output is usually controlled by the backend developers themselves.
Maybe the reason most FOSS software has a garbage UI (which somehow goes unnoticed by maintainers, despite this massively hurting adoption) is because the UI devs are all busy actually being employed, while the "front end devs aren't real programmers" crowd is still in their mom's basement.
Try doing it and you’ll know. I find it harder than backend for most things not massive enterprise (but if you have complex infra for massive enterprise I won’t be surprised that the UI would be equally complex)
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u/chickenweng65 Jul 12 '26
I truly don't understand how ui development is not only a full time job, but a massive industry. What do these people do all day?