4 ms·

I've never heard of front end development include graphics design.

flor1s 9y ago
I guess in the company I was working for we valued employees with T-shaped skills (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills), in which people have one discipline in which they are experts (such as HTML/CSS/JS and the supporting infrastructure) and they have enough experience with the related disciplines (i.e. graphics design, requirements engineering, back-end development) to collaborate with experts in that field.
- chao- 9y ago
  While that naming sounds a bit too MBA-ish for my ears, it does a good job capturing a concept that I have been trying to pin down for a while now in terms of the types of job candidates that have worked out best for me. Thank you for the metaphor, and for what it's worth, I agree in it being a desirable skill distribution. Incidentally, people at our company who have acquired said combination of wide skill breadth with a specific skill depth, got there because one employer or another (not always us) hired them when they were intent on (or already in the process of) a change of role. For instance, someone with a few years in graphics design who, when given a chance to (or being required to) work with HTML and CSS, found that not only did they like it, they wanted to learn and do more, even if that meant transitioning There are all sorts of questions I have about how that might fit into the arc of someone's career, how it affects salaries, and so on. Furthermore, I do not think it should be the only lens by which to assess people's skills, at the exclusion of all else. It just seems that many of our A-Players, as it were, came into our organization with that sort of skill distribution, or quickly grew to have it.
j00pY 9y ago
I think it used to be very common 10 years ago. A typical front end dev would do the graphics, HTML and CSS (or tables before CSS was popular).
stupidcar 9y ago
"Front end development" didn't exist as a separate software development discipline until a few years ago. Before that, you had "web developers" for a while, and before that, "web designers". These latter two categories were people whose primary responsibility was to translate Photoshop designs into HTML and CSS, and for that they needed, at least, a strong eye for visual design. Their use of JavaScript was limited to use of libraries like Scriptalicious, Mootools and (later) jQuery to add "Web 2.0" enhancements. Oftentimes they were simply designers who'd learnt HTML and CSS in order to help accurately translate their own designs, either because there was nobody else to do it, or because they couldn't entrust it to back-end programmers. Although the roles of designer and front-end developer were gradually bifurcating by around 2010, if you were recruited by an agency as a front-end developer, you were still almost certainly expected to demonstrate graphics design abilities, and would often be considered part of the design team than the programming team. It was only really with the rise of Single Page Applications that you started to see front-end development completely shed its origins as a adjunct to a designer's role.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  The picture was never quite as black and white as you're suggesting, I think, though certainly there were plenty of the kind of people you mentioned around. For example, some people working in web world have always just built stuff directly in-browser rather than slicing Photoshop images. This wasn't a new idea when responsive sites came along, nor when SPAs started to become a serious business; those trends just provided more awareness to some people who hadn't thought of working that way before. Some people expanded from a programming background into making more interactive web sites rather than from a design background, and it probably would never have occurred to them not to at least consider building with the native technologies from day one. It's true that as those front-end technologies develop, more substantial programming work is being done on the browser side, and so there has been a degree of specialisation in the roles involved, particularly in larger organisations. Even so, I'm not personally a fan of trying to maintain too strict a division between those roles. As with almost anything in a technical field, if you don't have at least a basic working knowledge of related skills and technologies, you're probably not going to be very good at whatever specialist task you're trying to do either. Similarly, if some key decisions and resources aren't managed by all of the relevant people collectively, problems will inevitably creep in for those who weren't as involved as they should have been.

I guess in the company I was working for we valued employees with T-shaped skills (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills), in which people have one discipline in which they are experts (such as HTML/CSS/JS and the supporting infrastructure) and they have enough experience with the related disciplines (i.e. graphics design, requirements engineering, back-end development) to collaborate with experts in that field.

chao- 9y ago
While that naming sounds a bit too MBA-ish for my ears, it does a good job capturing a concept that I have been trying to pin down for a while now in terms of the types of job candidates that have worked out best for me. Thank you for the metaphor, and for what it's worth, I agree in it being a desirable skill distribution. Incidentally, people at our company who have acquired said combination of wide skill breadth with a specific skill depth, got there because one employer or another (not always us) hired them when they were intent on (or already in the process of) a change of role. For instance, someone with a few years in graphics design who, when given a chance to (or being required to) work with HTML and CSS, found that not only did they like it, they wanted to learn and do more, even if that meant transitioning There are all sorts of questions I have about how that might fit into the arc of someone's career, how it affects salaries, and so on. Furthermore, I do not think it should be the only lens by which to assess people's skills, at the exclusion of all else. It just seems that many of our A-Players, as it were, came into our organization with that sort of skill distribution, or quickly grew to have it.

j00pY 9y ago

I think it used to be very common 10 years ago. A typical front end dev would do the graphics, HTML and CSS (or tables before CSS was popular).

stupidcar 9y ago

"Front end development" didn't exist as a separate software development discipline until a few years ago. Before that, you had "web developers" for a while, and before that, "web designers". These latter two categories were people whose primary responsibility was to translate Photoshop designs into HTML and CSS, and for that they needed, at least, a strong eye for visual design. Their use of JavaScript was limited to use of libraries like Scriptalicious, Mootools and (later) jQuery to add "Web 2.0" enhancements. Oftentimes they were simply designers who'd learnt HTML and CSS in order to help accurately translate their own designs, either because there was nobody else to do it, or because they couldn't entrust it to back-end programmers. Although the roles of designer and front-end developer were gradually bifurcating by around 2010, if you were recruited by an agency as a front-end developer, you were still almost certainly expected to demonstrate graphics design abilities, and would often be considered part of the design team than the programming team. It was only really with the rise of Single Page Applications that you started to see front-end development completely shed its origins as a adjunct to a designer's role.

Silhouette 9y ago
The picture was never quite as black and white as you're suggesting, I think, though certainly there were plenty of the kind of people you mentioned around. For example, some people working in web world have always just built stuff directly in-browser rather than slicing Photoshop images. This wasn't a new idea when responsive sites came along, nor when SPAs started to become a serious business; those trends just provided more awareness to some people who hadn't thought of working that way before. Some people expanded from a programming background into making more interactive web sites rather than from a design background, and it probably would never have occurred to them not to at least consider building with the native technologies from day one. It's true that as those front-end technologies develop, more substantial programming work is being done on the browser side, and so there has been a degree of specialisation in the roles involved, particularly in larger organisations. Even so, I'm not personally a fan of trying to maintain too strict a division between those roles. As with almost anything in a technical field, if you don't have at least a basic working knowledge of related skills and technologies, you're probably not going to be very good at whatever specialist task you're trying to do either. Similarly, if some key decisions and resources aren't managed by all of the relevant people collectively, problems will inevitably creep in for those who weren't as involved as they should have been.