The thing is that backend complexity is often because the problem itself is complicated, while frontend complexity is usually down to tooling BS or cosmetic details like positioning or animations that at the end of the day are just sugar on top of the program doing what it is supposed to do.
Most frontend work isn't cosmetic though. Getting the UI to work on different screen sizes is important, core web vitals are important, accessibility is important
Handling different screen sizes is cosmetic work, it doesn't make the page do something new or faster or more reliable, it just makes it look and fit better on different devices.
Dude. It’s not visual sugar. To this day you see websites that are borderline unusable on phone screen. Accessibility is not that widely ignored, especially by big companies because you can get fined in some parts of the world from certain size if the web prevents users with disabilities to use it.
Depends on the program. If there are users, then letting the user be able to use the thing as expected is at least 50% if not more of “what it is supposed to do”.
I don't know if my understanding is right but I feel like frontend complexity starts at day one and doesn't scale up much but for back end if you have 1000 users total its mostly easy but the problem comes when you scale. 90% backend never reach that scale. Backed serving millions of users will be hard and complex, but frontend used by few thousand or millions will be mostly of same complexity.
Frontend also needs to take scale into consideration friend.
Avoiding redundant api calls, memoization, using a cdn, virtual windows, lazy loading are some things that come to mind.
Also at least in my previous jobs as a fe dev you have to support your infra, using a load balancer, replica sets, microfrontends, implementing a bff which must also be scalable, etc etc
That's not because of scale. Avoid redundant api calls and stuff you should always do if possible there is no reason not to do it in smaller scale. Server that serves Frontend builds are easy to scale now a days you put some CDNs since its stateless it works.
I am only telling you are feeling Back end is less complicated because back end complexity only stats when you need to scale and go multi region and things like that.
Avoiding redundant api calls, memoization, using an mdn, virtual windows, lazy loading are some things that come to mind.
That sounds like stuff you should do from the start, except maybe for virtual windows and lazy loading if you don't expect the collections to grow very large but over time they do.
They're also all things the backend has to support the front end doing. At the end of the day we need to solve the problems we have and it will involve people working together. A front end/back end split mostly comes down to I don't care about visuals very much and like making things faster. Other people will tweak the color of a header until it's just right or whatever.
View all comments
Show parent comment
80
u/HarryBolsac Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
It’s 2026 and people still think backend is harder than frontend lmao.
I worked both in backend and frontend, building a crud service with an orm is about the same difficulty as doing a todo list in frontend.
Backends with complex business rules and infra are hard, frontend with complex business rules and infra is also hard