Yep, the way I see it is that both backend and frontend development have their bad parts: you either faff around with broken config files, or faff around with broken stylesheets. (Obviously both have their good sides too). It comes down to which you find easiest to tolerate. E.g., I don't enjoy fixing CSS quirks in IE6, but I find it a lot less painful than trying to figure out why my fastcgi daemon keeps crashing.

Thankfully many/most of us don't have to worry about IE6-7, and IE8 is falling off (mostly)... the app I currently work on is only IE9+ and modern browsers. I feel that IE9 is really the only legacy browser with significant market share.. once that's passed, it will be better for all involved.

I've been dealing with browser quirks since the mid 90's... there's never been a better time to be a web developer. That said the browser tech alone has exploded with CORS, Web Sockets and WebRTC ... that's not counting the ground gained with node.js, mongodb and others...

The landscape is rapidly changing, so who knows what the near, and the next couple of years will bring to the table. Golang, docker.io and coreos are other things to keep an eye on.

The common denominator of all that is wrong with development today is the internet. Work on a library, thick client, compiler, or anything like that and you are fine, but work too close to any of the tiers in some kind of internet/web based application and your day is filled with misery.

Hopefully this internet thing will just fade away soon and we can all go back to real development.

Web development is a complex ecosystem. As a front-end dev I don't get to control much: many types of devices and software might run my code or display my HTML. Catering to that is the nature of the environment, and that heterogeneity (of devices and software) is what makes the Internet great.

I disagree that catering to that fills one's day with misery. In fact I think it's fun and I wouldn't enjoy working on a library, thick client or compiler quite as much. That's ok, development is big enough for us both to find something we like doing, without needing to denigrate what we don't like.

Well put.

Also, even for a front-end person, those don't have to be mutually exclusive options.

Case in point: this week I am working on both heterogeneous end user-facing UI stuff AND [relatively] controlled-environment node-based webdev tooling for our FE team. I enjoy both types of challenges and think its healthy not to get too pigeon-holed into one such context or the other.

/$.02

Which is why I personally let the designer(s) faff around with broken CSS and automated install scripts faff around with config files. Leaving me to fully enjoy my life of solving behaviour problems.

This is the solution. Having just automated our multi-server, multi-purpose configuration using Ansible, I can't tell you how many orders of magnitude better my life just became.

Manual server management: Not even once.

I'm in the exact same boat as you MDCore - the job description describes me decently well, but I too have my pick of jobs. If you need to hire yesterday, this company should consider hiring a UI person and a JS person separately.

Not always an option for startups... When you have a super small team, this role is often filled by only one hard-to-find person.