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"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

"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.

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.