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Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs

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Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs

#21

Post by mattew »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #11

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.

So many developers underestimate the need for good, quality visual design and aesthetics in their work. In my experience most non programmers evaluate something first on how it looks, and if it doesn't look good, they won't be interested in how well it actually works. Most programmers on the other hand seem first to be interested in how well it works, without taking into account the look and feel.

Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs

#22

Post by dasil003 »

I agree with the idea that specialists are probably not a good fit for an early stage startup. There are a lot of hats to wear. But front-end vs back-end is a false dichotomy.

If you can get your hands on a brilliant illustrator who can also do pixel icon design as well as strong layout and UX , then even if their HTML skills are shakey they're going to be a strong asset. Similarly, if you have a back-end dev who writes really solid, performant, maintainable code and can handle infrastructure and sysadmin work (eyeballs drifting involuntarily in Zed's direction) then who cares if he has no experience stitching together CRUD apps with the framework dujour.

In other words, hire the best people you can get your hands on and put their skills to use.

Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs

#23

Post by modoc »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #13
nostrademons wrote: post #10

I'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 v…

Agreed. In my mind "front end" is HTML, JSP, CSS, JS/AJAX, Design, browser compatibility, etc... "Back end" is business logic/code development (Java in my case).

Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs

#24

Post by troels »

nostrademons wrote: post #10

I'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,…

Yeah - That's a pet-peeve of mine: frontend and backend are entirely contextual. Some people would say backend about server side code. Other might split the server side code into two. Some times your application uses web services; Then people often refer to those as being backend for your application. Without further qualification, the words are meaningless.

Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs

#25

Post by limedaring »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #11

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.

Agree with this. The front-end developer position should include design as well (as all web designers should have strong HTML/CSS skills anyways to correctly do their job).

Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs

#26

Post by dpritchett »

troels wrote: post #24
nostrademons wrote: post #10

I'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,…

Yeah - That's a pet-peeve of mine: frontend and backend are entirely contextual. Some people would say backend about server side code. Other might split the server side code into two. Some times your application uses web services; Then people often refer to those as being backend for your application. Without further qualification, the words are meaningless.

I met with an angel once who seemed to feel frontend meant suits and backend meant coders. I completely misunderstood his question because I was thinking of the coders' definition of the terms.

Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs

#27

Post by johnrob »

mattew wrote: post #21
tonystubblebine wrote: post #11

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.

So many developers underestimate the need for good, quality visual design and aesthetics in their work. In my experience most non programmers evaluate something first on how it looks, and if it doesn't look good, they won't be interested in how well it actually works. Most programmers on the other hand seem first to be interested in how well it works, without taking into account the look and feel.

I'm surprised this isn't one of the main concepts that repeatedly gets mention on this site. We obsess over 'make something people want', but never drill down deeper. Good design can go a long way toward making people want something.

I'm willing to bet that mint.com got a fair amount of popularity (and memorability) because it was so nice to look at.

Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs

#28

Post by aaronblohowiak »

johnrob wrote: post #27
mattew wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many developers underestimate the need for good, quality visual design and aesthetics in their work. In my experience most non programmers evaluate something first on how it looks, and if it doesn't look good, they won't be interested in how well it actually works. Most programmers on the other hand seem first to be interested in how well it works, without taking into account the look and feel.

I'm surprised this isn't one of the main concepts that repeatedly gets mention on this site. We obsess over 'make something people want', but never drill down deeper. Good design can go a long way toward making people want something. I'm willing to bet that mint.com got a fair amount of popularity (and memorability) because it was so nice to look at.

It really depends on the market and your positioning in the market. pg's startup didn't have awesome design, but it served a need that people had in a way that worked. "make something people want" doesn't have to mean "make something mass-marketable", though it frequently does.

Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs

#29

Post by arijo »

I think there's a bit of confusion here between designer and front end developer. A front end developer to me is someone with extraordinary javascript skills capable of working on new generation rich client/thin server web applications.

http://www.javascriptmvc.com

is an example of a javascript framework a front end developer would use to build this next level type of applications.

Re: Startups: Don’t Hire Frontend or Backend Webdevs

#30

Post by nerme »

efsavage wrote: post #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.

If there are two guys, one guy working on server-side code and another guy working on client-side code, either side could get held up waiting for the other guy to finish his part of the project.

Even if people aren't waiting around for something to be completed by someone else there is an overhead in communication. "Oh, you wanted the LIs to have that class name? Well I've got to go fix my CSS now... gimme a few minutes."

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