The thing is, backend stuff is largely solved. You need to store data? Here you go, here's a database. You need to process a bunch of strings for similarity? We got an algorithm for that.

But frontend stuff is messy. How do you tell a person what they're trying to do is wrong and they need to change their inputs? Oh, maybe we can highlight the input or we can pop a modal message. Haha, psyche! Users ignore that shit! Now what you gonna do, buddy?

Frontend is a mess because all you people are a mess.

Contempt for your users inevitably leads to bad products so it’s no wonder things are bad if this is the prevalent attitude among front end web developers.

There's a difference between contempt (i.e. "users are stupid") and realism, though. And realism can range from "users don't want to troubleshoot" to "some users are near-violently anti-tech and won't read errors", depending on context.

The unfortunate truth is that if you're doing B2C or even B2B outside of tech companies, the second one will often come up...

Bad devs exist. Bad users do too. Thing is, you can't usually fire the bad users.

> And realism can range from "users don't want to troubleshoot" to "some users are near-violently anti-tech and won't read errors", depending on context.

No dude, I have things to do and your little software is a tiny roadblock in my day. I dont want to become a fellow expert in your niche, do the thing and get out of my way.

Building UI for work and for consumers is completely different. I’ve done both, user attitudes are veeeery different. Building an ecommerce page is also very different to building an engagement trap for users to sit in.

Problems start when engineers/designers/producters don’t understand their users and their goals. Or when the user is not also the customer (this is the worst)

The OPs website is dogshit. Random blobs in the text that expand and require close buttons? No wonder this clown is fussing over anchors, bro doesn’t know wtf design actually is. Arrogant front end devs have to invent new problems to keep their jobs. It is creative obsolescence in reverse.

There's a third category too, users looking for security weakness and probing the system with a spectrum of inputs. The response to these inputs can reveal a lot about how the backend is designed.

Lack of concern or outright contempt for front end and the users is why front end development is a subfield in the first place, because backend devs can't or won't produce something people can use.

> backend devs can't or won't produce something people can use.

Where by people you mean management and sales, and by produce you mean add 150 different tracker scripts? :).

Snark aside, contempt for frontend dev and contempt for users are two different things; the latter has thoroughly infected the fields of UI/UX. It's most visible in webdev, because that's where most UI work happens. Second to that is mobile app dev, where it's just as bad.

Also, there are actually two somewhat distinct types of contempt for the user:

1) Paternalism - "users are idiots and need to be babysit at every step, or else they hurt themselves (or make us spend money on support)"; this one is pretty overt in UI/UX.

2) Exploitation - "users are livestock, the purpose of the site/app is to milk them as much as we can - whether it's taking their data, money, or both; the design must guide users to allow extracting maximum value from them before eventually discarding them"; this one is less talked about, even though it underpins many UI/UX patterns (not all of them known as "dark patterns").

I do a decent amount of ux work and probably fall into category 1 here. The problem isn’t “we don’t want to spend money on support”, the problem is “people really do need to be babysat for a lot of things, and no matter what you do, they will not read the documentation.

That's fair. People really are like that. This is suboptimal, and I emphasize with both frustrated devs and PHBs worried about escalating support costs. The reasons behind why users are like this are complex, but "users are stupid" isn't one of them.

It's a decent approximation, if you remember it's an approximation for "the user is tired/stressed/not paying attention/doesn't actually want to deal with your app". I remember a talk which suggested "The user is drunk" as a better approximation, because it's more obviously not literally true.

I think "users are not paying attention" is a friendlier way to describe it.

A while back, I was supporting an e-sports event. We had professionals, competing for an awful lot of money who were deeply familiar with the game. We had taken mobile phones, etc from them so no distractions.

They were briefed before hand that all they had to do was wait until they were given the green light, and click the big OK button on their screen to enter the game. We added a giant modal with the OK that explained "press this button when you are told to". This was a last minute workaround for the fact that we could only tell how many people were in the queue for something, but not which of our expected players were not in the queue. Our telemetry tells us one person is missing, so we have to go walking around to find them. Found the guy, sitting in front of a giant modal saying "Click this when you are told to", and his response was "I didn't know I was supposed to click it".

Now add mobile phones, children, doorbells, cooking, neighbours, and this becomes widespread.

> Paternalism - "users are idiots and need to be babysit at every step, or else they hurt themselves (or make us spend money on support)"; this one is pretty overt in UI/UX.

Reminds me of a quote I'm not too sure if it's authentic but it's way too believable: "There is a considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."

Like, over half the population is barely literate [1]. That's why we're seeing so, so many interfaces being "dumbed down", with options for "power users" being hidden behind ever increasing hurdles, font sizes and margins/paddings increasing, and visuals being dulled down. It's all being ground down to be palatable to an ever increasing amount of utterly braindead people.

[1] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s...

I agree with you

It reminds me of an online store in the beginning of 2000s

To buy a product, you had to drag&drop the product image over the shopping basket icon. It took me quite a while to figure that out, and I bet they lost a lot of customers.

[Edit: I acknowledge that a PM or manager may have forced the developer to do this, but it's just one example of many]

Sometimes the developers have to take the blame, instead of blaming "stupid" users. Some take that attitude to frameworks as well. If the users complain, they haven't understood how to use it correctly. Just look at the "how to make a todos in 5min" video on YouTube to be convinced of its beauty

Yeah, it's really easy to cherry pick an example from the past of an application probably built by a junior level employee being brow-beat into submission my an MBA-laden PM.

You may be right, but this is just one example

Also, backend people can be arrogant as well, but it seems that for some reason new ideas tend to be picked up quicker in frontend, which unfortunately results in bad ideas spreading fast too.

Nah, the front end is just visible. And any errors that originate get surfaced in the front end. All you get to see as a use is "website said no".

It's only now, in the days of "vibe coding" that I would firmly put the sole blame on developers for bad application interfaces, because it's usually just one clueless person who is YOLOing code out into the wild. Everywhere else: hidden icebergs of complexity and you didn't know what led to the current state.

contempt for users is the unavoidable consequence of having users.

I don't have contempt for users. I have contempt for single-issue developers who have never stepped out of their little corner of software who act like front end should be easy because it's "just" some scripting.

I don't read it as contempt but rather the equivalent of a backend engineer saying that you can't trust user inputs and need to validate, authenticate, and authorize every request.

I wouldn’t call what they wrote as “contempt.” It seems to me, to be cynical realism; something I tend to exhibit, myself.

I like people. I really do. I especially love the users of the software I write, and go well out of my way, to craft the best UI possible.

But I am constantly being blindsided by knuckleheads; some of whom, are really, really smart, educated, and inquisitive people.

I write iOS apps, and spend many, many hours, testing and tweaking. Right now, I am completely rewriting an app, because I couldn’t get the UI right, at the final stage. I realized my fundamentals were borked, and that I needed to go back to the ol’ drawing board, as Wile E. Coyote would say. Many developers would have shipped, but I have the luxury of being able to redo it (I have done it before).

It’s a cool trick, and one that I’d probably use, if I was dedicated to Web design, the way I am, to app design.

> Frontend is a mess because all you people are a mess.

As a backend guy who considers himself extremely fortunate that nearly all of his users/customers are technical, this got an audible chuckle out of me.

I believe it's because on the frontend, everyone wants to look different and have a unique identity. Whereas on the backend, everyone needs to be the same to follow standard best practices.

It's interesting that you used "wants" in the first sentence and "needs" in the second.

Not saying that you're totally wrong, but I think this difference is not necessarily a deliberate decision by individual engineers, or caused by personality or skill level.

The employee market demographics surely play a role, but this is about concretions, not generalizations.

There is no lack of (often poor) generalizations when it comes to the skills and requirements demanded by BE and FE roles, respectively.

Not wanting to dismiss your idea / the grain of truth. But IMO you are falsely generalizing.

Also, there are not only FE devs claiming to be "full stack" when they don't know HTTP basics.

There are also BE developers with similarly daunting knowledge gaps.

Or in other words, in both worlds there are juniors masquerading as seniors and the other way around, depending on the organization.

Well, part of that is a business need (your app/website/whatever is an extension of your brand, which is a very important part of making money). The other part is there are actually many valid ways to style a button, or have some kind of hover animation, or some kind of navigation bar.

Sure, there are some guidelines and best practices, but there are just infinite ways to display information to people. You can't just look at a technical specification for how well X/Y/Z performs because design is subjective and humans are all different. Whereas none of your users will complain if you use Redis (or similar) for caching something on the backend.

I'd imagine consumer hardware is the same.

For example, every Thunderbolt dock's internals are basically the same, while the outer shell tries to be as different as possible.

I think the biggest problem is that HTML and even HTTP weren't developed with those use cases in mind.

Before WWW was a thing we already had user interfaces and the fact that current users frequently prefer those ancient, text user interfaces over modern ones tells a real LOT.

Well if it continues to be a mess, something like WASM-based flutter-web might just eat the frontend

> The thing is, backend stuff is largely solved. You need to store data? Here you go, here's a database.

That's like saying "You need user interaction? Here you go, here's a frontend."