Comment by philsnow

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.