Comment by anon1094 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anon1094 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't understand why you're getting down voted, but this is absolutely correct and more specification is needed when it comes to "front-end".

I come from a traditional front-end background (for web) and I send many front-end jobs for my company RemoteLeads as well. Front-end is the most fragmented programming job category and I'm sure it's the one that gets the most applicants.

Companies will say they're looking for a front-end developer with JavaScript experience. In reality, they need an engineer. They need someone who understands Computer Science principles and can express that in JavaScript. But, because "JavaScript experience" can mean anything they'll get a lot of applications from Front-end Designers who are more on the HTML / CSS end of the spectrum.

And now with things like React Native it's getting even more complicated.

Ultimately, it's because knowing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript makes you such a powerful developer and you can do a lot.

To combat this the title has to be more specific. What do you need accomplished? Engineering? Design? It's not just front-end, be more specific.

Jerry Low put it best in his article titled The Death of Front-end Developers (https://medium.com/@jerrylowm/the-death-of-front-end-develop...)

I read the Jerry Low article and comments.

On the front-end, I feel like you can group people into two categories:

- Front-end/UI designer - UI specialist with HTML, CSS, wireframing and some JS skills

- Front-end developer - JS engineer typically leveraging JS frameworks and Bootstrap

In the comments section of Jerry's article, it feels like there are a bunch of HTML + CSS specialist who need to re-position themselves as UI designers. They are being displaced by front-end devs who can leverage Bootstrap to do the bulk of the UI. They can work with a UI designer to put together the workflow and tweak the UI.

Jerry also states: "Even without the divide on the front-end I still hear lots of people claiming they’re full stack developers — I guarantee they’re not."

I don't understand his perspective here. If you work on the front and backend then you are a full-stack developer. If on the other hand, a full-stack developer claimed to be an expert on both the front and backend...then I would be wary.

Definitions are complicated, it feels like they should be static when the definition of what a front-end developer does is always changing as technology comes up with different mediums like smartphones, watches, VR, etc.

I've thought about this a lot and I would say something like this:

A front-end/UI designer is concerned about the _user_ interface with the application, that is, how a user interacts and utilizes an application.

A front-end developer is concerned about the _client_ interface with the application, such as what browsers support what and how you can work with that, screen sizes and how to best utilize them(can't have a full word processor and keyboard in a smartwatch), how do you flow data through the client in a way that it doesn't hog the system's memory or makes everything slow, tradeoffs between server-side and client-side rendering, caching, optimization, optimistic UI, unstable connections, progressive enhancement and graceful degradation, and much more.

Of course, this doesn't mean a front-end developer/designer won't have to dabble in both roles eventually.

I appreciate the fact that Jerry Low's article is not quite as vicious as the title makes it out to be. A bit clickbaity the title, but the actual article makes a good point to separate the design portions of front-end dev from the wiring up the servers and databases portions of it.

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