This is not fun anymore

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

I have had 2 good friends of mine, both working as frontenders for many years, tell me that the work is not as fun as it used to be. 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago, working on the frontend meant doing creative worked that intermingled artistic design concerns and some technical cleverness for making the design real. But over the last 3 or 4 years, with the rise of the pure Javascript frontends, being a frontender has increasingly meant being a computer programmer, and my friends never signed up for that. One of them gave up their job and went back to school, they have decided to find a new career.

There are many things about the web that are less fun now than they used to be. Back in the 1990s, when the field was new, the Web was wide open to amateurs. Over the last 10 years, the field has professionalized. There is now an emphasis on process and procedures and ceremony. The systems have become more complex. We all feel it.

But the situation on the frontend is extreme, and the frontenders have suffered more than the rest of us.

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