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Backend developers are funny sometimes. I was talking last night with a guy on the other team. He kept insisting "this is a complex system, there are MILLIONS of entries in that db!" and he couldn't quite understand that I only care about looking at one at a time, or batches of 30 for the paginated list view, at most.

I'm not arguing that the backend isn't muscular and incredibly complex, because it is and as far as I'm concerned he's a wizard for making all that data dance efficiently. But I am front end, and all that is a black box behind an API to me and I like it that way.

Perspective will get you every time.

(Tbf he also thinks tables are incomprehensibly hard to write, so he is also kinda biased but still.)

@braindouche As a full-stack developer myself.... that is a bit suspicious. Obviously, I don't know your code base, but those should both be relatively simple tasks...

@LouisIngenthron
Oh ive run into hundreds of these guys. First, they reject the browser languages for being bad and refuse to learn them out of contempt, then they get stuck having to write UI code for each other and discover that it's hard to do because it's programming and programming is hard and it's extra hard because it's a different paradigm from what they're used to.

The result is backend programmers who consider html/css/js unusable amateur-hour garbage and also find UI programming impenetrably hard without massive tooling accomodations. It's a cliche, but loads of these guys exist.

@LouisIngenthron
And honestly the backend platform is horrifying, a combination of hardware management, analytics, data science, and network administration on an international scale. It's huge and trying to run in real time in every direction at once and has been maintained by java developers who work for an old fashioned manufacturing company. I get why he's nervous.

@braindouche Ouch, yeah that does sound bad. If the resources you need are spread across the world, pagination can get tricky.

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