The Hubris of Front-End Developers

The 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.<p>To be an effective FE, you need to understand the whole stack - not just how to install a jQuery plugin, but also CSS, Javascript <i>the language</i>, 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.<p>And you're right, most companies don't understand what FE engineers need or what they should be.

I wish this post had a <i>little bit</i> less dramatic headline. It makes this post sound much more inflammatory than it actually is.

HTML/CSS is a small piece of a stack that is fairly easy to pick up. There are hardly ever reasons to hire someone who is FE only (at small companies) and I often find that people who are FE only don't have the kind foundation that would allow them to venture into complicated JS code.<p>The author seems to be implying that SEs given front end responsibilities will struggle with them but that's only true in the way that they struggle with anything else new (the struggle is short lived because we're talking about markup with quirks).<p>Also, OP, if you read this, your footnotes link to the original text but it's covered by your huge fixed header.

I could not continue reading after the author started apologizing for the <i>computer-science-heavy interview</i>. Simply put, if computer science heavy questions bother you, you are not an A player.

In the "irony is ironic" department, we have a site with a low-contrast text/background combination. Readability Redux FTFW.<p>Which is more about Web design than FE, but still.

what 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.