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No one is policing this.
I know how to do full-stack development, not because I wanted to but because I had to.
Grim, but true. I know quite a few extremely talented front-end developers who have been forced out of the field because of what’s described here.
There is no choice anymore, I can’t escape it. React is so pervasive that almost every job is using it. On the rare occasion that they’re not using it, they’re using something like it.
It’s like CSS exists in some bizarre quantum state; somehow both too complex to use, yet too simple to take seriously, all at once.
In many ways, CSS has greater impact than any other language on a user’s experience, which often directly influences success. Why, then, is its role so belittled?
Writing CSS seems to be regarded much like taking notes in a meeting, complete with the implicit sexism and devaluation of the note taker’s importance in the room.
This resonates a lot:
At some point, we told design they couldn’t sit with us anymore, and surprise! It backfired! Now, not only has the field and profession of web design suffered, but also, we build shitty websites.
I’ve seen talented people—mostly women—pushed out of making websites because their skills—mostly CSS—weren’t valued as much being a React plumber.
It fucking sucks.
Dave laments the increasing number of complex jobs involved in front-end (or “full-stack”) development.
But whereas I would just leave at that, Dave does something constructive and points to a potential solution—a corresponding increase of more thinsliced full-time roles like design engineering, front-end ops, and CSS engineering.
Keep refreshing until you find your next job title.
Want to work with me? If so, come and be a design engineer at Clearleft!
What’s a design engineer? A front-end developer at the front of the front end who values accessibility, performance, and progressive enhancement.
We’re looking for a design-friendly front-end developer with demonstrable skills in pattern-based prototyping and production to join our friendly and supportive team in the heart of Brighton.
Even if this isn’t for you, please spread the word …especially to potential candidates who aren’t mediocre middle-aged white dudes (I’ve already got that demographic covered).
We need engineers, we need designers, and we absolutely need design engineers to make that connection across the great divide between the front-of-the-front-end and the back-of-the-front-end. It’s only then that we can make truly great things together.
Here’s a seven-year old post by Snook—this design engineer thing is not new.
It’s been just over two years since Chris wrote his magnum opus about The Great Divide. It really resonated with me, and a lot of other people.
The crux of it is that the phrase “front-end development” has become so broad and applies to so many things, that it has effectively lost its usefulness:
Two front-end developers are sitting at a bar. They have nothing to talk about.
Brad nailed the differences in responsibilities when he described them as front-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end web development:
A front-of-the-front-end developer is a web developer who specializes in writing HTML, CSS, and presentational JavaScript code.
A back-of-the-front-end developer is a web developer who specializes in writing JavaScript code necessary to make a web application function properly.
In my experience, the term “full stack developer” is often self-applied by back-of-the-front-end developers who perhaps underestimate the complexity of front-of-the-front development.
Me, I’m very much a front-of-the-front developer. And the dev work we do at Clearleft very much falls into that realm.
This division of roles and responsibilities reminds me of a decision we made in the founding days of Clearleft. Would we attempt to be a full-service agency, delivering everything from design to launch? Or would we specialise? We decided to specialise, doubling down on UX design, which was at the time an under-served area. But we still decided to do front-end development. We felt that working with the materials of the web would allow us to deliver better UX.
We made a conscious decision not to do back-end development. Partly it was a question of scale. If you were a back-end shop, you probably had to double down on one stack: PHP or Ruby or Python. We didn’t want to have to turn away any clients based on their tech stack. Of course this meant that we had to partner with other agencies that specialised in those stacks, and that’s what we did—we had trusted partners for Drupal development, Rails development, Wordpress development, and so on.
The world of front-end development didn’t have that kind of fragmentation. The only real split at the time was between Flash agencies and web standards (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).
Overall, our decision to avoid back-end development stood us in good stead. There were plenty of challenges though. We had to learn how to avoid “throwing stuff over the wall” at whoever would be doing the final back-end implementation. I think that’s why we latched on to design systems so early. It was clearly a better deliverable for the people building the final site—much better than mock-ups or pages.
Avoiding back-end development meant we also avoided long-term lock-in with maintainence, security, hosting, and so on. It might sound strange for an agency to actively avoid long-term revenue streams, but at Clearleft it’s always been our philosophy to make ourselves redundant. We want to give our clients everything they need—both in terms of deliverables and knowledge—so that they aren’t dependent on us.
That all worked great as long as there was a clear distinction between front-end development and back-end development. Front-end development was anything that happened in a browser. Back-end development was anything that happened on the server.
But as the waters muddied and complex business logic migrated from the server to the client, our offering became harder to clarify. We’d tell clients that we did front-end development (meaning we’d supply them with components formed of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and they might expect us to write application logic in React.
That’s why Brad’s framing resonated with me. Clearleft does front-of-front-end development, but we liaise with our clients’ back-of-the-front-end developers. In fact, that bridging work—between design and implementation—is where devs at Clearleft shine.
As much as I can relate to the term front-of-front-end, it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. I don’t expect it to be anyone’s job title anytime soon.
That’s why I was so excited by the term “design engineer,” which I think I first heard from Natalya Shelburne. There’s even a book about it and the job description sounds very much like the front-of-the-front-end work but with a heavy emphasis on the collaboration and translation between design and implementation. As Trys puts it:
What I love about the name “Design Engineer”, is that it’s entirely focused on the handshake between those two other roles.
There’s no mention of UI, CSS, front-end, design systems, documentation, prototyping, tooling or any ‘hard’ skills that could be used in the role itself.
Trys has been doing some soul-searching and has come to the conclusion “I think I might be a design engineer…”. He has also written on the Clearleft blog about how well the term describes design and development at Clearleft.
Personally, I’m not a fan of using the term “engineer” to refer to anyone who isn’t actually a qualified engineer—I explain why in my talk Building—but I accept that that particular ship has sailed. And the term “design developer” just sounds odd. So I’m all in using the term “design engineer”.
I can imagine this phrase being used in a job ad. It could also be attached to levels: a junior design engineer, a mid-level design engineer, a senior design engineer; each level having different mixes of code and collaboration (maybe a head of design enginering never writes any code).
Trys has written a whole series of posts on the nitty-gritty work involved in design engineering. I highly recommend reading all of them:
I’m not trying to convince anyone they aren’t a full-stack developer or don’t deserve that particular merit badge — just that the web is a big place with divergent needs and ever-morphing stacks that all require different sets of skills.
This article by Ian Bogost from a few years back touches on one of the themes in the talk I gave at New Adventures:
“Engineer” conjures the image of the hard-hat-topped designer-builder, carefully crafting tomorrow. But such an aspiration is rarely realized by computing. The respectability of engineering, a feature built over many decades of closely controlled, education- and apprenticeship-oriented certification, becomes reinterpreted as a fast-and-loose commitment to craftwork as business.
Alright! It’s day two of An Event Apart in Seattle. The first speaker of the day is Chris Coyier. His talk is called How to Think Like a Front-End Developer. From the website:
The job title “front-end developer” is very real: job boards around the world confirm that. But what is that job, exactly? What do you need to know to do it? You might think those answers are pretty cut and dried, but they’re anything but; front-end development is going through something of an identity crisis. In this engaging talk, Chris will explore this identity through the lens of someone who has self-identified as a front-end developer for a few decades, but more interestingly, through many conversations he’s had with other successful front-end developers. You’ll see just how differently this job can be done and how differently people and companies can think of this role—not just for the sake of doing so, but because you’ll learn to be better at your own jobs by understanding how other people are good at theirs.
I’m going to see if I can keep up with Chris’s frenetic pace…
Chris has his own thoughts about what front-end dev is but he wants to share other ideas too. First of all, some grammar:
I work as a front-end developer.
I work on the front end.
Those are correct. These are not:
I work as a front end developer.
I work on the front-end.
And this is just not a word:
Frontend.
Lots of people are hiring front-end developers. So it’s definitely a job and a common job title. But what does it mean. Chris and Dave talked to eight different people on their Shop Talk Show podcast. Some highlights:
Eric feels that the term “front-end developer” is newer than the CSS Zen Garden. Everyone was a webmaster, or as we’d say now, a full-stack developer. But if someone back then used the term “front-end developer”, he’d know what it meant.
Mina says it deals with things you can see. If it’s a user-facing interface, that’s front-end development.
Trent says that he thinks of himself as a web designer and web builder. He doesn’t feel he has the deep expertise of a developer, and yet he spends all of his time in the browser.
So our job is in the browser. You deal with the browser (moreso than other roles). And by the way, there are a lot of browsers out there.
Maybe the user is what differentiates front-end work. Monica says that a back-end developer is allowed not to care about the user if their job is putting a database together. It’s totally fine not to call yourself a front-end developer, but if you do, you need to care about the user.
There are tons of different devices and browsers. It’s overwhelming. So we just gave up.
So, a front-end developer:
It’s taken for granted that you can use a computer. There’s also the soft skills of interacting with co-workers. Then there are the language-specific core skills. Finally, there are the bonus skills—all the stuff that makes you you.
The languages you need to strongly understand to read, write and maintain them.
HTML and CSS. Definitely. You don’t come across front-end developers who don’t do those languages. But what about JavaScript?
Eric says it’s fine if you know lots of JavaScript but it’s also fine if you don’t write everything from scratch. But you can’t be oblivious to it. You need to understand what it can do.
So let’s put JavaScript into the bucket of core skills too.
Peggy believes that as a front-end developer you need to have a basic proficiency in accessibility too. This is, after all, about user-facing interfaces.
The Figma team have a somewhat over-engineered graphic of all the skillsets that people might have, between “baseline” and “supplementary”.
Perhaps we all share a common trunk of skills, and then we branch in different directions.
Right now though, it feels like front-end development is having an identity crisis. It’s all about JavaScript, which is eating the planet.
JavaScript is crazy popular now. It’s unignorable. Yes, it’s the language in the browser, but now it’s also the language in loads of other places too.
Steven Davis says maybe we need to fork the term front-end development. Maybe we need to have UX engineers and JavaScript engineers. Can one person be great at both? Maybe the trunk of skills forks in two very different directions.
Vernon Joyce called this an identity crisis. The concepts in JavaScript frameworks are very alien to people with a background in HTML, CSS, and basic interactive JavaScript.
You could imagine two people called front-end developers meeting, and having nothing in common to talk about. Maybe sports.
Brad says he doesn’t want to be configuring build tools. He thinks of himself as being at the front of front-end development, whereas other people are at the back of front-end development.
This divide is super frustrating to people right now.
Michael Schnarnagl brings up the point about how it’s affecting hiring. Back-end developers are being replaced with JavaScript engineers. Lots of things that used to be back-end tasks are now happening on the client side. Component-driven design, site-level architecture, routing, getting data from the back end, mutating data, talking to APIs, and managing state—all of those things are now largely a front-end concern.
Let’s look at CodePen. There’s a little heart icon on each pen. It’s an icon component. And the combination of the heart and the overall count is also a component. And the bar of items altogether—that’s also a component. And the pen it sits under is a component. And the page it’s in is a component. And the URL for that page is a component. Now the whole site is a front-end developer’s concern.
In the past, a front-end developer would ask a back-end developer for an API endpoint. Now with GraphQL, the front-end developer can craft a query to get exactly what they need. Sure, the GraphQL stuff had to be set up in the first place, but that’s one-time task. Once it’s set up, the front-end developer has everything they need.
All the old work hasn’t gone away either. Semantics, accessibility, styling—that’s still the work of a front-end developer as well as all of the new stuff listed above.
Hiring is a big part of this. Lara Schenk talks about going for an interview where she met 90% of the skills listed. Then in an interview, she was asked to do a fizzbuzz test. That’s not the way that Lara thinks. She would’ve been great for that job, but this single task derailed her. She wrote about it, and got snarky comments from people who thought she should’ve been able to do the task. But Lara’s main point was the mismatch between what was advertised and what was actually being hired for.
You see a job posting for front-end developer. Who is that for? Is it for someone into React, webpack, and GraphQL? Or is it for someone into SVG, interaction design, and accessibility? They’re both front-end developers. And remember, they can learn one another’s skills, but when it comes to hiring, it has to be about the skills people have right now.
Peggy talks about how specialised your work can be. You can specialise in SVG. You can specialise in APIs and data.
We’re probably not going to solve this right now. The hiring part is definitely the worst part right now. One solution is to use plain language in job posts. Make it clear what you’re looking for right now and explain what background you’re coming from. Use words instead of a laundry list of requirements.
Heydon Pickering talks about full-stack developers. Their core skills are hardcore computer science skills.
Brad Frost concurs. It tends not to be the other way around. The output tends to be the badly-sketched front of the horse.
Even if there is a divide, that doesn’t absolve any of us from doing a good job. That’s true whether it’s computer science tasks or markup and CSS.
Despite the divide, performance, accessibility, and user experience are all our jobs.
Maybe this term “front-end developer” needs rethinking.
Let’s peak into the minds of very different front-end developers. Chris and Dave went to Dribbble, pulled up a bunch of designs and put them in front of their guests on the Shop Talk Show.
Here’s a design of a page.
Here’s a different, more image-heavy design.
Here’s a more geometric design.
Here’s a financial mobile UI.
Here’s a crazy festival website.
Here’s an on-trend mobile design.
Here’s an image-heavy design.
Here’s an extreme navigation with big images.
Here’s a design that’s map-based.
Here’s a card UI.
Chris has been thinking about and writing about this topic of what makes someone a front-end developer, and what makes someone a good front-end developer. The debate will continue…
Something that I am increasingly uncomfortable with is our industry’s obsession with job titles. I understand that the landscape has gotten a lot more complex than when I started out in 2009, but I do think the sheer volume and variation in titles isn’t overly helpful in communicating what people actually do.
I share Andy’s concern. I kinda wish that the title for this open job role at Clearleft could’ve just said “Person”.
An excellent thorough analysis by Chris of the growing divide between front-end developers and …er, other front-end developers?
The divide is between people who self-identify as a (or have the job title of) front-end developer, yet have divergent skill sets.
On one side, an army of developers whose interests, responsibilities, and skill sets are heavily revolved around JavaScript.
On the other, an army of developers whose interests, responsibilities, and skill sets are focused on other areas of the front end, like HTML, CSS, design, interaction, patterns, accessibility, etc.
A good ol’ rant from Robin.
HTML and CSS and JavaScript have always been looked down upon by many engineers for their quirks. When they see a confusing and haphazardly implemented API across browsers (HTML/CSS/JS), I see a swarming, writhing, and constantly improving interface that means we can read stuff that was written fifteen years ago and our browsers can still parse it.
Before jumping to conclusions, read the whole thing. Robin isn’t having a go at people who consider themselves full-stack developers; he’s having a go at the people who are only hiring back-end developers and expecting them to automatically be “full stack.”
I like this distinction between coders and developers.
The Coder is characterized by his proficiency in a narrow range of chosen skills.
By contrast the Developer’s single greatest skill is in being an applied learner.
I’m definitely not a coder. Alas, by this criterion, I’m also not a developer (because I do not pick things up fast):
Quite simply the Developer has a knack for grokking new [languages|frameworks|platforms] and becoming proficient very quickly.
I prefer Charlie’s framing. It’s not about speed, it’s about priorities:
I’m not a “developer” in that I’m obsessed with code and frameworks. I’m a “developer” as in I develop the users experience for the better.
In my experience, “full-stack developers” always translates to “programmers who can do frontend code because they have to and it’s ‘easy’.” It’s never the other way around. The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description.
Sometimes our job titles and distinctions feel like the plastic grass in a sushi bento; flimsy and only there for decoration.
Yves Peters examines the typography of Star Trek. Unlike Typeset In The Future, which looks at on-screen typography, this article dives into titles and promotional posters.