Yeah but the ecosystem drags it about as far down as you can go.

Backend development for large applications relies on stability, the JS ecosystem has anything except stability.This is okay for FE development where you naturally have a lot of churn.

It’s a reasonable expectation that a backend built today should be maintenance free and stable over the next 5-10 years if no more features or bugfixes are required. And is buildable, as is, anywhere in that timeframe with minimal or zero additional work.

Additionally, strong backends in the same ecosystem are similar, they use similar technologies, similar configs, similar patterns, and similar conventions. This is not the case for JS/TS backends, there is incredible churn that hurts their long term stability and the low-maintenance requirements of strong enterprise, and even more importantly small businesses backends.

Mature ecosystems provide this by default this is why C#/Java is so popular for these long-standing, massive, enterprise systems. Because they are stable, they have well established conventions, and are consistent across codebases and enterprises.

This is a perspective most devs in the ecosystem lack, given that half of all developers have < 5 years of experience and the vast majority of that is weighted into the JS ecosystem. It takes working with systems written in python, TS, JS, C#, Java…etc to gain the critical insight necessary to evaluate what is actually important in backend development.

Edit: to be clear this isn’t just shitting on JavaScript because that’s what people do, I work with it everyday, TS is by far my favorite language. 2/3 of my career is with JS/TS. This is recognizing actual problems that are not singularly solvable with the ecosystem that pulls down its liability for backend development. There are languages and ecosystems are much better for your back end it’s not that scary to learn a new language (many of my co-workers would disagree it’s not scary 😒)

If you do this enough you know how to design your solutions to be relatively flexible. At least for your backends.

Your frontend will always churn, that’s the nature of the job.

I think you can have a well tended garden without giving up creativity.

You’re not sacrificing creativity by practicing structures, considerations, and methodologies that maintain or improve the developer experience with whatever creative endeavor you’re on.

The structure of your garden doesn’t prevent you from playing around with new plants, it just outlines a set of patterns and expectations known to drive better outcomes.

I’m not saying that your extension of the analogy is bad I’m just disagreeing with some of the premise.

Pretty much.

For instance focusing on PR size. PR size may be a side effect of the maturity of the product, the type of work being performed, the complexity or lack thereof of the real world space their problems touch, and in the methodologies habits and practices of the team.

Just looking at PR size or really any other single dimensional KPI lead you to lose the nuance that was driving the productivity in the first place.

Honestly in my experience high productivity comes from a high level of unity in how the team thinks, approaches problems, and how diligent they are about their decisions. And isn’t necessarily something that’s strictly learned, it can be about getting the right people together.