Hiring front-end developers

A designer with no experience in development has a higher chance of creating a design that's difficult to implement. The amount of time wasted trying to explain to an illustrator CS buff why using vectors flying all over the place will be difficult... is ridiculous.

A developer with no experience in design has a higher chance of missing all of the features and nuances that make a sublime design kick ass (often the details a designer will ask for will be viewed as esoteric or anal..or esoterically anal).

Hybrids will do things like, look at illustrator...look at html5 canvas...and then combine the two into something awesome like Ai to Canvas. Hybrids will cut down your transition between design and development (which can be huge). Hybrids can cut down frictional labor costs. Hybrids can cross pollinate ideas between the two fields.

Case and point is that Hybrids are a class of their own. No, they may not have the extent of "depth" in their skill that a single focused dev or designer would, but that's because they have a "depth" in something different. And that "difference" is often innovative and far beyond what sticking to the "master of one" fallacy will do.

"A designer with no experience in development has a higher chance of creating a design that's difficult to implement."

It's better to educate the designers yourself than have them educate themselves because it's not guaranteed they won't still ask for a design that's borderline impossible to be cut up by tomorrow. The place I work at the designers design and the developers develop and it works great for us. The designers liaison with the developers throughout the entire process, it's not a simple matter of letting the designers have free reign and then expect you to develop it. I might be one of the lucky few, but this is how all places should work. Designers and developers should sit together not be isolated from one another and only speak via a project manager which is how it seems to be at a lot of places. It's an us vs them mentality in the industry.

A lot of places I've worked prior to the place I've been working for a few years now have had this mentality that the designers know best. While a designer who understands what is possible is a viable asset, a designer who considers themselves a developer and gets in the way of the process to the point they're telling the developers what to do is counter-productive rather than working with the developers not against them and vice-versa.

I've encountered hybrids who have adequately been able to do both development and design, not in an advanced capacity but I've encountered lots of designers and developers who can easily design and knock up a Wordpress theme, however I've never come across a designer/developer who can design a complicated interface for a web application and be able to build it as well. I could be wrong and I don't doubt there are some super-talented people out there capable, but I see too many advertisements for hybrids that assume they're as common as trees in a forest.

> > You’ll be working on a greenfield project. Any tool you use is fine as long as you know it REALLY well. Except of course for Ext.js. There’s just no excuse for using it ever.

This definitely deserves extra emphasis.

I can answer all except "What's the difference between display: inline-block and float: left?". What is it?

I learned CSS when IE6 was new and shiny. I think there's a gap in the market for books to update skills - e.g. a "What's usable in CSS since IE6?". I still find odd things I can now use as I only have to target IE8+...

Why? It's a silly comment on ExtJS. It's a huge framework but in the right context, it can be exactly the right tool for the job.