The Front End Engineering Spectrum: The Roles

Overall this is one of the best top-down looks at the "roles" front-end developers can fit into. However, the point I'm so apt to obsess over is that people (who hire) can't get it that these differences exist ... so I'm compelled to encourage everyone to push this on hiring managers, recruiters, cto's, whatever.

The "hybrids" and "full stack" folk are out there (and I always stress the need to overlap on either end of the spectrum) but the vast majority of talent has an overwhelming strength in one of those three core capabilities: Design, UI Development, Server-side Development.

That's not to say you can't be A+ in 2/3. Instead if your company looking to hire a "2/3" then you better get ready to pony up. OR, you can target the area whose needs you are most in need of and see if their interests or overlap into the other capabilities.

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With regard to converting Photoshop in to HTML templates, here's an interesting post from 37Signals on why they don't use photoshop:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1061-why-we-skip-photoshop