Yes and no. You can't be amazing at programming from the kernel up to the front-end and be amazing at designing from the front end all the way to marketing and

Yes and no. You can't be amazing at programming from the kernel up to the front-end and be amazing at designing from the front end all the way to marketing and UX. Reminds me of Forrst. About six of us had checked just "developer"; seemed like almost the entire population had checked both "designer" and "developer" and were proceeding to ask really basic programming questions. On the other hand, there is seemingly limitless employment for people who can both design and implement a website. But that employment doesn't pay as well as just one or the other, even though it's easier to do just one or the other. The people who need these skills wrapped up in one person need it that way because they're too cheap to hire two people. The people who can afford someone special can afford two or three someone specials. In fact, the people who need you to be both probably would like you to write the backend as well, which you've sort of implied you don't do. So if you're in the market for employment with two decent skills, you stand good odds of being outcompeted by people with one excellent skill. The problem with this line of reasoning is, where do you draw the line? I think the distinction between front-end developer and designer is pretty tenuous. If I show a developer a binary tree and ask them to calculate the height mathematically, I expect to hear the answer "log base two" without delay. Most of the front-end developers I've met have encyclopedic knowledge of Javascript, the DOM, several JS libraries and the various browser quirks, but could not solve a pure coding challenge offline with no time limit and their choice of printed technical literature. If you fit this front-end developer profile, but can also design, you belong to an interesting and fairly small class of people who really can do essentially the entire front-end themselves. I laud these people and I'm not at all convinced that to be effective at one you have to give up on the other. On the other hand, if you're a kernel hacker on the weekend and doing front-end development and design during the week, I think the advice is probably sound. You're not going to be able to be one of these front-end wizards while also doing totally unrelated stuff.