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As a front end dev, I've noticed the steady increase in job offers. Most of us had the benefit of growing with the technology. Its why when you see a group of F
by fuzzywalrus 11y ago
As a front end dev, I've noticed the steady increase in job offers. Most of us had the benefit of growing with the technology. Its why when you see a group of Front End Devs, you'll see a group of mostly early 30 somethings to 40 somethings, and not the usual crowd of young faces in other practices.
The biggest problem I see with Front End Development is the massive trove of tacit knowledge it takes. If you have a portfolio that goes more than a decade deep, a junior front end dev might run across a table based layout, or baffled by transparent gifs used to position. Or perhaps its a site made 7 years ago, and its locked on a 960 grid and the jr dev is throw by the "Clearfixes", used to modern frame works that magically clear floats by psuedo elements, and doesn't understand why her/his grid isn't working when she/he forgets to manually clear the floats. It could be even a site that is 5 years old, and relies on wurfl to do user agent detects the baffling usage of user agents at all to detect mobile.
Anyhow, that's just scraping the surface. My standing theory is Front End Development is only a few years away from being divided into more roles as the current bar for knowledge entry is getting to be almost unattainable.
- ThrustVectoring 11y agoIMO, the biggest thing you want from a front-end developer that a back-end one is missing is HTML/CSS skills and design chops. If you can hire for that skill-set in particular, polyglot programmers can make the UIs come alive in a pretty efficient manner.
- bottlerocket 11y agoI'd agree with your theory. Early this summer interviewing for 2 nearly identical positions I was told from one I was too technical, they want someone more design-focused; and I was too design focused, they want someone more technical from the other. Both positions are still open. Assuming I didn't completely tank both interviews, I got the sense in feedback afterwards they both wanted a magical front end/back end/ designer dynamo and are holding out/hoping for that person to apply. I think companies initially define a FED role they need, and then in interviews find everyone has slightly different but overlapping skillsets/specialties. Someone says 'hey wouldn't it be nice if we could find a dev that has all these" and spin their wheels endlessly searching for the unicorn rather than hire 2 complimentary people. Especially when they're already pushing their budget limits.