> Facebook, Google and Microsoft all use the web stack to run huge companies.
And they throw huge amounts of resources at the web stack to do it. It might work for them, but I'm not sure that makes it powerful, performant, and manageable for those of us who aren't huge companies.
You probably do not have the complexity level of these companies either.
To me js and css are kind of manageable, a bit the same way as python: use strongly enforced linters forbidding anything ambiguous, do not jump every other day in a new sexy bandwagon, and do not let one line of code commited in without an automated test running it on a ci machine.
What I found harder to manage is the young FE devs themselves: for them it seems every new project, or every new view in the same project, is the opportunity to use a completely different, new toolset. Oh, and some new syntaxic sugar candies supposed to "save" a couple of keystrokes (which is the worst reason you can find to use a new syntax requiring its own tools). I find this very dangerous, especially when the github repos holding these tools are 3 months old.
> What I found harder to manage is the young FE devs themselves: for them it seems every new project, or every new view in the same project, is the opportunity to use a completely different, new toolset. Oh, and some new syntaxic sugar candies supposed to "save" a couple of keystrokes (which is the worst reason you can find to use a new syntax requiring its own tools). I find this very dangerous, especially when the github repos holding these tools are 3 months old.
This is because employers are demanding that candidates know the latest and greatest technologies (eg. looking for 5 years of experience in 1 year old technology). I'm an FE dev, and during my last round of interviewing 3-4 months ago I was asked about my thoughts on Redux, CSS Modules, Radium, Docker, GraphQL/Relay, ClojureScript/Om, etc.
If I need to be experienced with this stuff to stay employable because just doing my job isn't enough, then I'm going to learn it.
As an employer I would be negatively surprised if a candidate for FE never heard of react, angular, etc. But I also see a red flag of the candidate were to assure me to be knowing all of them bottom up. That would mean a lot of toy projects and unstable personality, if not plain lies. I'd be looking for someone able to work for some years on a code base, grasp its stack, improve the overall structure, quickly find and fix bugs in a sustainable way, etc.
Or move to the back-end, where things move at a more survivable pace. Here's the dirty secret, too: for the most part, the work you do there is actually easier than front-end work, since you have better tooling and frameworks that don't shift under you like quicksand. And building a CRUD backend to a REST API might be a tad tedious, but it's a whole lot less fiddly than mucking about with CSS and trying to make web UIs pixel perfect in every mongrel browser under the sun.
Honestly I would if not for the fact that backend interviews always test Crack the Coding Interview style data structures & algorithms knowledge, which I have no interest in spending my limited spare time preparing for (I didn't major in CS).
Your last paragraph describes my experience with web development exactly. Ironically I'm 22, but I've worked with people or talked to people online who want to use the "latest and greatest" for what could've been a simple CRUD app.
And they throw huge amounts of resources at the web stack to do it. It might work for them, but I'm not sure that makes it powerful, performant, and manageable for those of us who aren't huge companies.