The Hubris of Front-End Developers
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The Hubris of Front-End Developers
1–10 of 27 posts
Re: The Hubris of Front-End Developers
#2I wish this post had a little bit less dramatic headline. It makes this post sound much more inflammatory than it actually is.
Re: The Hubris of Front-End Developers
#3In the "irony is ironic" department, we have a site with a low-contrast text/background combination. Readability Redux FTFW.
Which is more about Web design than FE, but still.
Re: The Hubris of Front-End Developers
#4I wish this post had a little bit less dramatic headline. It makes this post sound much more inflammatory than it actually is.
Yea, my fault; I had written something more inflammatory, but after a bunch of edits I had moderated my tone once I realized I was just ranting against bad FE candidates I had interviewed.
Re: The Hubris of Front-End Developers
#5I could not continue reading after the author started apologizing for the computer-science-heavy interview. Simply put, if computer science heavy questions bother you, you are not an A player.
Re: The Hubris of Front-End Developers
#6what was the point of this article?
Where's the hubris?
Bunch of incoherent sentences strung together meandering around a non existent point that is never made.
Re: The Hubris of Front-End Developers
#7The negative comments about this post by others are interesting; perhaps it's because I'm also a FE Engineer, but I thought much of what you said was spot-on. I've managed to specialize in FE only because I can also do back-end work; I have a hard time hiring other FEs because so many only know jQuery, and a spot of html and css, and I simply don't have room on my small engineering team unless they can supplement more or are very fast learners.
To be an effective FE, you need to understand the whole stack - not just how to install a jQuery plugin, but also CSS, Javascript the language, html, where these technologies are going (html5, ecmascript 6), what the back end stack looks like, how data gets from the database to the browser, how the browser rendering engine works, pragmatic optimizations, functional and OO concepts, version control, browser quirks, the TCP stack, and deployment. No, you don't have to specialize in these things, but you need to be familiar or willing to get familiar.
And you're right, most companies don't understand what FE engineers need or what they should be.
Re: The Hubris of Front-End Developers
#8I could not continue reading after the author started apologizing for the computer-science-heavy interview . Simply put, if computer science heavy questions bother you, you are not an A player.
Simply put, if computer science heavy questions bother you, you are not an A player.
And herein lies the problem - the hubris of a SW Dev. So often the more artistic-leaning FE Dev is interviewed by the more pragmatic-leaning SW Dev. The software dev starts asking questions about recursion and collections and then labels the FE as a terrible developer.
What you have to understand is that FE Devs don't care about that stuff. They aren't trained in it, they aren't interested in it. They have a completely different domain knowledge than the SW Dev and that's fine. It's not worse, it's just different.
It doesn't make them a non-'A player'. They could very well be an A player in their particular domain. Watching a good FE Dev sling HTML/CSS/JS is a thing of beauty. It's not as easy as a lot of SW Devs think it is.
Re: The Hubris of Front-End Developers
#9The negative comments about this post by others are interesting; perhaps it's because I'm also a FE Engineer, but I thought much of what you said was spot-on. I've managed to specialize in FE only because I can also do back-end work; I have a hard time hiring other FEs because so many only know jQuery, and a spot of html and css, and I simply don't have room on my small engineering team unless they can supplement mor…
To be an effective FE, you need to understand the whole stack
I completely disagree. There are a lot of organizations that completely abstract the front end from the rest of the stack and have only UI developers work on a very focused piece.
It doesn't help a UI developer to know the DB schema or the middle tier components. They need to know where they can get the data they need and where to send updates. That's about it. It can be helpful if they know business flow (not necessarily logic).
Re: The Hubris of Front-End Developers
#10The negative comments about this post by others are interesting; perhaps it's because I'm also a FE Engineer, but I thought much of what you said was spot-on. I've managed to specialize in FE only because I can also do back-end work; I have a hard time hiring other FEs because so many only know jQuery, and a spot of html and css, and I simply don't have room on my small engineering team unless they can supplement mor…
> .. how the browser rendering engine works,
since you mentioned, could anyone point me in the direction of good resources for learning exactly this?