I have a five person team and the fifth person, a front end developer, is a frickin' godsend. He has a design sense. He knocks out new designs and design changes in minutes whereas the rest of us take days to come up with crummy looking updates. My lesson in this: as you grow you'll find your team has holes that need patching. Go and patch them.
Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs
11–20 of 44 posts
Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs
#12I'm kinda curious if his definition of "frontend" developers is the same as mine. To me, the frontend includes everything up to the purely-computational algorithms and storage of the website. That's the HTML/CSS/JS, but also the webserver/webframework, RPC system, or database API (but not the database itself). Rails is a frontend technology. I consider backend work to the computationally-intensive part. Data mining,…
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Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs
#13I'm kinda curious if his definition of "frontend" developers is the same as mine. To me, the frontend includes everything up to the purely-computational algorithms and storage of the website. That's the HTML/CSS/JS, but also the webserver/webframework, RPC system, or database API (but not the database itself). Rails is a frontend technology. I consider backend work to the computationally-intensive part. Data mining,…
Commonly, in 2.0 shops of few people:
Client-side -> "frontend"
Server-side -> "backend"
You're right that when the server-side gets nontrivial you need to stratify the architecture and the role definitions for the participants. At that point, "backend" means a just what you describe, and the business logic implementors are building what I'd call the middle-tier; it is seldom more than ORM retrieval, formatting and validation.
When you start involving ETL, algos, complex "systems" programming, deep integration with external vendors then you leave this paradigm and start having "real" backend devs.
Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs
#14Yep, absolutely. But in reality there aren't that many brilliant developers who can do both with skill and you are lucky if you can find them AND convince them to join you. To attract those, you're going to have to have a big offer (both remuneration and the nature of the startup) to attract these folks. Another school of thought is find back-end devs that can do some ops (although yes, it's ideal to have that as a s…
great front-end devs are sooooo rare.
Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs
#15"Most small startups (by which I mean fewer than 20 people) don’t have enough work..."
What? WTH kind of startup is short on stuff to do? If you have 2 general-purpose devs, they're going to be 100% busy. if you have 1 front-end and 1 back-end dev, they're going to be 100% busy. If you add another dev, that person is going to be 100% busy, whether they're front-end or back-end.
Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs
#16The point being missed is this:
Does the flexibility of your salary options translate to a better product, or does a better product translate to the flexibility of your salary options?
If your answer is the latter, then it makes much more sense to hire front-end and back-end developers to focus on their respective niches; front-end devs focus on making the product usable and keeping users engaged. Back-end devs focus on making sure the product functions, builds features that evolve out of user interaction and keeps those features running.
When you try to combine these niches and ask a guy to play both front-end and back in his priorities become conflicting and your product becomes one of those sites that was either "Built by a designer" or "Designed by a developer".
Don't hire an architect to do an engineer's job, is what I'm saying. They play similar roles, but they have very different focuses that can directly impact the final product. Exceptions exist.
Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs
#17I'm kinda curious if his definition of "frontend" developers is the same as mine. To me, the frontend includes everything up to the purely-computational algorithms and storage of the website. That's the HTML/CSS/JS, but also the webserver/webframework, RPC system, or database API (but not the database itself). Rails is a frontend technology. I consider backend work to the computationally-intensive part. Data mining,…
That's a very good definition. And by that definition I can clearly align myself to one of the two sides (front-end). I wish everyone would use it.
On the other hand I think most people are using the terms a bit differently. A front-end developer is a bit of what used to be called a web designer (html/css+ "photoshop" skills) with javascript newly added that's used just for client-side UI.
The backend people handle the database, business logic and everything else that's on the server. It actually seems like this world doesn't need those domain-specific algorithms people.
With this definition, I prefer to work on the backend, but I can also work on the front-end.
Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs
#18In my experience, successful RIAs require close co-design between 'client' and 'server' components. Many people think they can "encapsulate" these issues away but distributed systems break most people's assumption.
You can have people who are database experts, Flash or HTML "designers" or mad javascript, actionscript or Silverlight coders -- but if there isn't somebody in charge who understands distributed systems and the restrictions that exist on RIAs, you are d00med.
Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs
#19I don't really agree. Front-end web developer have totally different skill than back-end developer. In a startup where there are few employees, the front-end developer can work extremely well on "design" part of all aspect of the company.. Video sh outcast, publicity, marketing, even building design.
As, back-end developer can do a lot more then back-end service.. they can work on backup, administrative unix task, optimizing task, inner-house tools, etc etc.
So I think it's more like: Design=front-end, ComputerGeekStuff=Back-end.. and it's really rare to find someone that does both of those things.
Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs
#20The problem with this notion - as mentioned by a few people in the article's comments - is that it is difficult to find developers with a high level of expertise for both sides of the fence. Is it worth the extra expenditure of time in the hiring process to look for two people who are good in both realms? Or is it better to spend less time looking for one front-end expert (with passable server skills) and one server-…
You can also just hire someone who's smart and willing to learn. I mean web development isn't that hard. I know everyone wants to hire someone who meets every single one of their many requirements (we've all seen the job ads), but realistically how long is it going to take a smart developer to pickup say Javascript + whatever APIs you're using? A few weeks? You could easily spend months trying to find the perfect hire.