from Hacker News

Clarifying the 5+ Roles of a “Front-End Web Developer”

by wclittle on 12/22/14, 8:46 PM with 12 comments

  • by etjossem on 12/22/14, 10:11 PM

    It bears mentioning that the "Designer" and/or "Front End Developer" in a small startup team will usually end up wearing several of these hats.

    Larger teams can afford the level of specialization described here, but a smaller company (or a small internal team) may have a technical front-end developer who produces prototypes and live code, plus a non-technical designer who does everything else on the design side. If it's a really tiny team, there might be a single person who rapidly produces mockups and scripts for usability tests, then turns around a few days later and starts writing HTML/CSS/JS based on their findings.

    I wish there were a better word than "unicorn" for people with a wider band of responsibilities. "Full-stack UX" sounds a bit silly too.

  • by steven777400 on 12/22/14, 9:48 PM

    I like the separation between design and development (also mentioned by atomicfiredoll). I'm decent at implementation but have zero design skills. I realize that a lot of companies don't have the budget to have separate designers and developers, but it does limit the talent pool to require both in one person.

  • by atomicfiredoll on 12/22/14, 9:41 PM

    It may be a bit out of date (and sparse in places,) but I've always pointed those who seem confused to this article from CSS Tricks:

    http://css-tricks.com/job-titles-in-the-web-industry/

  • by bzalasky on 12/22/14, 10:24 PM

    The UI Designer role described in this article should ideally be able to cover everything in the UI Developer role. The JavaScript Developer role should also be able to cover that role. I agree with the rest of the whittling down.

    However, saying that someone who specializes in JavaScript is essentially the same as a back-end developer is inaccurate. The types of problems an experienced JavaScript developer deals with on a regular basis are fundamentally different than those that a back-end only developer deals with (not trying to imply that there isn't overlap).

  • by drinchev on 12/22/14, 10:28 PM

    I was wondering are there any companies at all that follow such differentiation between the job offerings?

    I consider myself "Front-end developer". Actually I've been working and marketing what I"m doing with those 2-3 words for the last 10 years and I had been hired on a couple of jobs using this as a s a job title.

    I don't think I'm a designer, though.