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A Proposal: Renaming Backend/Frontend to Application/UI Developers

theothersideofcode.com

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Re: A Proposal: Renaming Backend/Frontend to Application/UI Developers

#3

Post by dutchbrit »

I hate titles, sure, it does look more fancy. Besides, you can have frontend only applications written in javascript. Would that make me just a 'UI Developer'? I can go on and on, but just stick with a title that explains your skills the best. I can't stick a label on myself. I dabble in a lot of fields.

I don't disagree with all of your points however. People should just make up their own title that fit them best.

Re: A Proposal: Renaming Backend/Frontend to Application/UI Developers

#4

Post by zacharyvoase »

I tried calling myself an 'Application Developer' once before, and it lasted about 5 minutes, because I suddenly started receiving requests to build people's iOS/Android app ideas.

I never called myself a back-end developer anyway; if people ask me what I do I just say 'I program computers—and yes, it really is that general'.

Re: A Proposal: Renaming Backend/Frontend to Application/UI Developers

#5

Post by kapowaz »

No.

“The border between the server and the client has faded”

So why continue to use distinct job titles? I think ‘web developer’ suffices; the specific skills you can bring will vary from person to person, but you should be fighting against being pigeon-holed, not embracing it by voluntarily saying you belong in one category and not another.

Re: A Proposal: Renaming Backend/Frontend to Application/UI Developers

#6

Post by zappan »

dutchbrit wrote: post #3

I hate titles, sure, it does look more fancy. Besides, you can have frontend only applications written in javascript. Would that make me just a 'UI Developer'? I can go on and on, but just stick with a title that explains your skills the best. I can't stick a label on myself. I dabble in a lot of fields. I don't disagree with all of your points however. People should just make up their own title that fit them best.

I'm afraid you're missing it a bit - just making only javascript applications is the reason to make a different distinction - some people are better at doing MVC, and they do it in the browser now; while some people are great in making great looking UIs, but not really digging into application architecture. And, of course, there are people doing both, being full-stack devs, but still they're usually more efficient in some areas than the others - I am such an example, still I know UI devs that are way more efficient and know neat tricks on the UI, as well as some great UI libraries to do their work faster (and usually better, relying on the know-how built into the lib) because they specialize in that.

Thanks for your comment regarding labeling, though... I agree that sometimes it's inappropriate, still sometimes it's useful to figure out the kind of work being done under such a label

Re: A Proposal: Renaming Backend/Frontend to Application/UI Developers

#7

Post by t4nkd »

Yeah, I'm not really feeling the persuasion here. I really don't know many "frontend developers" or "backend developers" to begin with. I know plenty of people struggle writing maintainable, well structured applications or who don't grasp front end concepts/technology enough to really produce anything production worthy. Those people are still "my peers" first and I typically consider their title to be "software engineer" or possibly "web developer". The individuals lacking a grasp on front end technology probably need to learn just as well as an individual with great front end skills needs to learn the rest of the stack. We're so heavily coupled now, in terms of squeezing performance out of an application and the ability to iterate rapidly, that throwing a bunch of backend logic and/or API's over the wall to "UI Developers" is probably not only a waste of time, but detrimental to the process. Throwing code over a wall is usually what happens when two distinctly different types of engineers are in the same product and avoiding it is tricky.

All this opinion of course is coming from someone who has managed to develop design, UI/UX, and a programming skill set and I'm probably pretty biased when it comes to pidgin holing people into a single role. Having said that, this proposal really smells like an easy way to "be lazy" out of a responsibility in the project. Dismissing a UI issue by surrendering, "But I'm the Application Developer, I don't really do UI" sounds like the more common scenario in the roles you're proposing. The reality is, if you want to keep working on web-oriented applications, you might need to grasp a bit of both, or at least some of each and a lot more experience in either direction(e.g. learning the full stack and then taking a deep interest in hardware performance WRT application profiling).

Good luck with your ambition though, I'm sure if you can make it popular the industry won't care about how I feel .

Re: A Proposal: Renaming Backend/Frontend to Application/UI Developers

#8

Post by zappan »

t4nkd wrote: post #7

Yeah, I'm not really feeling the persuasion here. I really don't know many "frontend developers" or "backend developers" to begin with. I know plenty of people struggle writing maintainable, well structured applications or who don't grasp front end concepts/technology enough to really produce anything production worthy. Those people are still "my peers" first and I typically consider their title to be "software engin…

Thanks for your thoughts... Still, positions are usually labeled like that. Personally I'm a full-stack dev, but I'm far more efficient in the application architecture role than the UI stuff, although I'm capable of doing it all.

The responsibility has less to do with titles, as a responsible developer can and will take several roles in the project if one's capable to do so...

Re: A Proposal: Renaming Backend/Frontend to Application/UI Developers

#10

Post by davedx »

t4nkd wrote: post #7

Yeah, I'm not really feeling the persuasion here. I really don't know many "frontend developers" or "backend developers" to begin with. I know plenty of people struggle writing maintainable, well structured applications or who don't grasp front end concepts/technology enough to really produce anything production worthy. Those people are still "my peers" first and I typically consider their title to be "software engin…

> We're so heavily coupled now

I think if anything we're less tightly coupled than we used to be. So many projects now have a clearly defined backend API and a separate front-end project. The problem though is that these front-end projects that used to be HTML/CSS with some JavaScript are now becoming almost full-stack applications themselves, with all the nuts and bolts you'd associate with backend projects (routing, controllers, application logic, complicated event handling) now also in the frontend.

In terms of how we describe roles in software, as long as it's from a genuine specific need (e.g. "frontend JavaScript developer") and not just some mix of buzzwords, I don't really see the problem.

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