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Discussion on: Is front-end development having an identity crisis?

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andreagr profile image
Andrea

I never fully understood what is the purpose in defining someone a front-end engineer to be honest.
As an engineer I was raised to know "all", from databases to OOP, from designing circuits for iot to scripting language.
In my startup our approach is to leave to a designer the design of the UI, and for us to reproduce it, as it would be really an unnecessary pain to integrate two different part (front-end and back-end).
I personally find it more Agile and easy to organise, hence I find the only suitable figure to be a full-stack developer.

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assaultoustudios profile image
Vernon Joyce

From a workflow perspective I agree with you, it makes complete sense for a single developer to handle most of the development work and have that intermediate step (i.e someone that just builds UI). I personally believe that the UI designer should be doing the front-end work whereas the engineers build the integrations.

Another thing I was getting at is what you mention in your comment. You know about a lot of things as an engineer; and in that role it makes sense that you should. But it feels as if a lot of that responsibility is moving towards the front-end developer now. It's not necessarily wrong; perhaps front-end developers should be learning these skills; but then we have to standardize it or the list of required skills just becomes too long.