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Maybe on a small line of business app. On a big, widely used consumer facing app however, front end developers really come into their own. They have cross bro

Maybe on a small line of business app. On a big, widely used consumer facing app however, front end developers really come into their own. They have cross browser, cross device responsive design issues to contend with. Accessibility and graceful degredation. Performant JavaScript. They also need design skills. Very few people have deep skills in back end and front end.

crdoconnor 11y ago
I've seen plenty of projects with separate front end and back end developers fuck up because the front end developers try to solve "back end problems" on the front end and vice versa. This is the cause of an awful lot of technical debt, and "big, widely used consumer facing app" is the natural habitat of large technical debts.
- madeofpalk 11y ago
  I've seen projects where a 'back end dev' has written CSS or other FE stuff and done a terrible job of it - just bad code. CSS and the DOM has it's own set of quirks and bits of required knowledge that good FE devs will all know quite well.
- biokoda 11y ago
  No matter how you do it you can shoot yourself in the foot.
- arethuza 11y ago
  I vividly remember a case where a really simple page in a system had become incredibly slow - on asking what had changed I was told "all we did was add a count of the number of users". Turns out the back end (they were micro-services - even though the term hadn't been invented at that point) didn't have a call for "total number of users" so the front end code (this was server side HTML generation - 10+ years ago) was getting a list of every user in the system and iterating over all of them in chunks and counting.
  - bliti 11y ago
    Probably some last minute feature that was forced with a same day deadline. If I had a dollar for each of those I'd be able to retire.
- gclaramunt 11y ago
  That's a communication issue, in our project, we sit our back end devs side to side the front dev ends. "Information must flow".
- lighthawk 11y ago
  > I've seen plenty of projects with separate front end and back end developers fuck up because the front end developers try to solve "back end problems" on the front end and vice versa. I totally agree, but even if you have a front-end and back-end communicating well, sometimes the front-end developers throw too much over the wall to the back-end, like when the front-end "thinks it is more intuitive if the request looked like this" instead of something else that would be just as easy to create and would be much less work on the back-end. And I'm sure the opposite is true as well with back-end putting too much work on the front-end. And, in the argument against a single full-stack developer being the solution to this problem, I've seen extremely talented full-stack developers create some terrible user interfaces, and some who created great user interfaces that would struggle to create adequately performant server-side services to back them.
- richardw 11y ago
  I don't think that means we must end specialisation and lose all the benefits it brings. Rather: specialise and communicate better.
mattmanser 11y ago
Performant javascript is exactly what front end devs can't do. Mono linguistic programmers don't tend to be very good, front end devs are almost by definition mono linguistic developers.
- rifung 11y ago
  So you're telling me you think that someone who works in javascript, poured hours and hours into it, and has to understand the ins and outs of browsers is going to write worse performing javascript than someone who mainly works with other languages? That doesn't sound right to me.
  - mattmanser 11y ago
    Yes, they don't know anything about development because they only know one language and they're spending loads of time doing non-engineering, i.e. HTML, CSS and dealing with browser inconsistencies. This is not revolutionary speak, it's been long known that mono-linguists tend to really suck at making things run fast, regardless of their dedication to using that one language. No-one in their right mind ever called flash developers genius coders, in fact they were (generally rightfully) regarded more as designers than developers and yet that's exactly the same niche front-end devs occupy today. I've seen it more than once now, massive load of javascript built around the 'recommended' design patterns that as soon as you turn back into simple functions and throw a few if statements into to stop them initializing every page load, boom, massive page load gain. You can be an expert on hoisting and this and ES6 and still suck at engineering, in fact I've seen it more than once in multiple languages, guys who knew entire language specs and yet couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. There are 4 types of front end dev: 1. Designer who can throw together a few scripts 2. Inexperienced developer/designer 3. Developer who happens to have moved to javascript with basic design skills 4. Unicorn who's great at design and development Everyone thinks they're 3 & 4s, in reality 95% of front end developers are 1 & 2s. Half the things that get posted here that have dedicated front end devs are juddering, slow, scroll jacking monstrosities. Don't try and tell me that's not the present state of the front-end development, because we all know the reality is there's very few, actually good, front-end developers out there.
morgante 11y ago
> They also need design skills. I disagree with this and am tired of the coupling between front-end development and design. Especially on large apps, dedicated designers do the designer. Front-end developers implement.
- madeofpalk 11y ago
  The inverse of this is when there's a glaring error in a design (we all write bugs - this is just a design bug) and the front end dev implements that in the final product. Of course, other processes (QA, Design QA, etc) has to fail for this to go through to production... I don't think we need FE Devs who are full on designers, but FE devs who are design 'aware' are, in my experience, much better.
  - morgante 11y ago
    Yes, I think they should be able to tell when a design is off, but that's different from design skills. Developers need as much a design ability as designers need engineering ability.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  If only every company actually hired real designers...
jacques_chester 11y ago
> Very few people have deep skills in back end and front end. At Labs we practice pair programming with frequent (ideall daily) rotation, so skills tend to diffuse and stories tend to get looked at by people with different backgrounds.

crdoconnor 11y ago

I've seen plenty of projects with separate front end and back end developers fuck up because the front end developers try to solve "back end problems" on the front end and vice versa. This is the cause of an awful lot of technical debt, and "big, widely used consumer facing app" is the natural habitat of large technical debts.

madeofpalk 11y ago
I've seen projects where a 'back end dev' has written CSS or other FE stuff and done a terrible job of it - just bad code. CSS and the DOM has it's own set of quirks and bits of required knowledge that good FE devs will all know quite well.
biokoda 11y ago
No matter how you do it you can shoot yourself in the foot.
arethuza 11y ago
I vividly remember a case where a really simple page in a system had become incredibly slow - on asking what had changed I was told "all we did was add a count of the number of users". Turns out the back end (they were micro-services - even though the term hadn't been invented at that point) didn't have a call for "total number of users" so the front end code (this was server side HTML generation - 10+ years ago) was getting a list of every user in the system and iterating over all of them in chunks and counting.
- bliti 11y ago
  Probably some last minute feature that was forced with a same day deadline. If I had a dollar for each of those I'd be able to retire.
gclaramunt 11y ago
That's a communication issue, in our project, we sit our back end devs side to side the front dev ends. "Information must flow".
lighthawk 11y ago
> I've seen plenty of projects with separate front end and back end developers fuck up because the front end developers try to solve "back end problems" on the front end and vice versa. I totally agree, but even if you have a front-end and back-end communicating well, sometimes the front-end developers throw too much over the wall to the back-end, like when the front-end "thinks it is more intuitive if the request looked like this" instead of something else that would be just as easy to create and would be much less work on the back-end. And I'm sure the opposite is true as well with back-end putting too much work on the front-end. And, in the argument against a single full-stack developer being the solution to this problem, I've seen extremely talented full-stack developers create some terrible user interfaces, and some who created great user interfaces that would struggle to create adequately performant server-side services to back them.
richardw 11y ago
I don't think that means we must end specialisation and lose all the benefits it brings. Rather: specialise and communicate better.

mattmanser 11y ago

Performant javascript is exactly what front end devs can't do. Mono linguistic programmers don't tend to be very good, front end devs are almost by definition mono linguistic developers.

rifung 11y ago
So you're telling me you think that someone who works in javascript, poured hours and hours into it, and has to understand the ins and outs of browsers is going to write worse performing javascript than someone who mainly works with other languages? That doesn't sound right to me.
- mattmanser 11y ago
  Yes, they don't know anything about development because they only know one language and they're spending loads of time doing non-engineering, i.e. HTML, CSS and dealing with browser inconsistencies. This is not revolutionary speak, it's been long known that mono-linguists tend to really suck at making things run fast, regardless of their dedication to using that one language. No-one in their right mind ever called flash developers genius coders, in fact they were (generally rightfully) regarded more as designers than developers and yet that's exactly the same niche front-end devs occupy today. I've seen it more than once now, massive load of javascript built around the 'recommended' design patterns that as soon as you turn back into simple functions and throw a few if statements into to stop them initializing every page load, boom, massive page load gain. You can be an expert on hoisting and this and ES6 and still suck at engineering, in fact I've seen it more than once in multiple languages, guys who knew entire language specs and yet couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. There are 4 types of front end dev: 1. Designer who can throw together a few scripts 2. Inexperienced developer/designer 3. Developer who happens to have moved to javascript with basic design skills 4. Unicorn who's great at design and development Everyone thinks they're 3 & 4s, in reality 95% of front end developers are 1 & 2s. Half the things that get posted here that have dedicated front end devs are juddering, slow, scroll jacking monstrosities. Don't try and tell me that's not the present state of the front-end development, because we all know the reality is there's very few, actually good, front-end developers out there.

morgante 11y ago

> They also need design skills. I disagree with this and am tired of the coupling between front-end development and design. Especially on large apps, dedicated designers do the designer. Front-end developers implement.

madeofpalk 11y ago
The inverse of this is when there's a glaring error in a design (we all write bugs - this is just a design bug) and the front end dev implements that in the final product. Of course, other processes (QA, Design QA, etc) has to fail for this to go through to production... I don't think we need FE Devs who are full on designers, but FE devs who are design 'aware' are, in my experience, much better.
- morgante 11y ago
  Yes, I think they should be able to tell when a design is off, but that's different from design skills. Developers need as much a design ability as designers need engineering ability.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
If only every company actually hired real designers...

jacques_chester 11y ago

> Very few people have deep skills in back end and front end. At Labs we practice pair programming with frequent (ideall daily) rotation, so skills tend to diffuse and stories tend to get looked at by people with different backgrounds.