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Comment by jon-wood | Hacker News Reader

Over the last year or so I’ve started splitting what was once the big “Frontend Developer” role into two distinct parts. The first is the traditionally thought of one - taking mockups or a style guide and using that to create the visual elements of an application. CSS, HTML, and some JavaScript sprinkles.

The second is a much more development focused developer role, someone who can take the work done by the first variety of frontend person and then break it down into components and integrate that with a backend API in complex ways.

The two are very different roles which can rarely be fulfilled by a single person. I think we should stop trying to bundle them into the same thing.

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Then the first should IMHO be called a front-end designer. Developer to me is someone who develops logic, not some interaction with JavaScript.

Think for example of developing a static website. I wouldn't ask a developer to do that, I would ask a web designer, which I expect to be versed both in "design for the web" (as opposed to, e.g., "design for print") and being able to translate it to the chosen medium (that is, HTML and CSS).

Anything more (business logic etc) are the domain of a developer. So as soon as the site is not static anymore and becomes an actual web application, that's where designers are out of their area of expertise and developers kick in.

This is how we are organized where I work, at least.

> and being able to translate it to the chosen medium (that is, HTML and CSS).

Writing good, maintainable HTML and CSS is fundamentally an engineering role -- how to deal with z-index, how to structure into components to avoid abuse of !important, the performance implications of animating transform() vs other properties, how to factor into variables for colors and distances, how to avoid spaghetti classes because CSS is fundamentally global.

In my experience, good designers and good engineers generally come from quite different mindsets, and I would never expect a designer to write well-engineered and maintainable HTML/CSS, the same way I would never expect an engineer to be versed in the intricacies of the rhythms of typography, color theory, or the emotional associations of positive and negative space.

They exist. They're exceedingly rare, though. I know only a handful and they tend to stick to one framework or way of doing things at a time to keep their learning burden to the absolute minimum. They're also pretty picky about who they work with.

(One of my friends that meets this description is looking for a new remote Ember gig. If one of you out there at a cool company looking for a new dev+designer send me an email and I'll intro you.)

We've recently learned about that designer/developer distinction where I work.

We asked the designer to do the HTML/CSS/JS for his web designs. Brochure website turn around times decreased but the code is far more difficult to maintain. In some cases, I've had to reimplement a component just to adjust sizes.

There's a lot more technical thought than meets the eye behind well structured static frontend code. It's a skill in its own right and programmers tend to produce better work than designers when judged solely on technical aspects. Alas, a designer always has the edge when it comes to visual quality and that's arguably what sells the work.

My 2 cents:

One of the hats I wear is what I'd call a "frontend app developer," corresponding to the second role mentioned by OP. I work with vue/webpack/etc. I have a passable knowledge of HTML/CSS. Give me a CSS framework and I can give you a LOB crud app with minimal fuss.

Occasionally I've had to work on visually cutting-edge projects. In those cases, I've found that having a traditional frontend dev (OP's first role) and a designer on the team to be indispensable. The frontend dev specializes in thinking/coding visually with the toolset specifically provided by the web. Sophisticated layouts need careful consideration, balancing new specs (grid, flexbox), performance, maintainability, backwards compatibility, and responsiveness. Dynamic/interactive graphics and animation present a large number of approaches and frameworks all with their own tradeoffs. Then there's font rendering/scaling, optimization for print, email, and the list goes on.

I guess what I'm getting at is that the strictly visual part of frontend development is huge. Easily big enough to justify its own specialty. And for me, keeping up with the frontend app-development landscape, in addition to backend/distributed-systems, that all just doesn't leave enough bandwidth for me to become amazing with the visual side of frontend dev.

And the idea that a designer could do this is, to me, really improbable. Most designers I work with spend their lives in Photoshop/Sketch. Some know the basics of HTML/CSS - the box model, selectors, margins and padding and box-shadows and font-sizes, maybe some basic layout. I haven't met a single one that knows what a polyfill is, or could come close to dealing with flexbox/grid layout, or scss, or webpack, or git, nor could they set up a good workflow that rebuilds and live-reloads 4 different views every time you hit save.

The frontend is now an app distribution/fat-client system. And it's huge and requires more and more specialties, there's just no getting around that.

I agree that there are two more or less distinct skillsets here. Although as always, it more than possible for someone to be adept at both. In fact, all the places I've worked that were hiring front end devs were looking for people who had both of these skill sets. And indeed we are often hiring for Full-stack developer who have both of these skillsets + ability with backend lanaguages and frameworks.

Places I've worked have been relatively small though (30-150 employees including non-technical staff), and I can totally see that in larger organisations there would be roles which specialised in only one of these areas.

Do you really have someone who would be equally comfortable/effective with a large complex PWA, on the scale of, say, Trello - and with a beautiful boutique site (say, for a sophisticated web-native publisher), with lots of motion, infographics, video, layers, custom interaction, heavy photography, etc. I've yet to meet such a person. Of course I agree that one can specialize in one and be passable at the other, but to be equally strong in both, I also wonder what sort of career or company produces that...

Not equally comfortable. I think people will always have strengths in some areas over others. But good enough with the weaker skill that they might be preferable over another candidate whose specialism was that skill.

I also think that while in some cases the projects requiring these skillsets are distinct from each other, there are plenty of projects that require both. Consider Google Photo's infinite scroll feature for example.

I completely agree. But I think that small amount of knowlegde does wonders.

A designer does not need to know how to code, but to think in terms of elements and components.

Otoh. a developer does not need to know how to design, but basic typography and whitespace should be taught on the job. We are design implementors.

Calling that person web designer is wrong on so many levels, just like in print the guy doing the preparations for printing and setting up machines is not a designer (although many designers do that part of the work too). In web it's the same, it's the step of implementing the design (a picture) into html and it's a separate role that's often been looked down by us (real?) programmers, but in reality it takes a lot of expertise to be good at it, so we should at least acknowledge it as a position that is much more about programming than designing. Actually I know quite a few people who are excellent in css and not know the first thing about design...

>Developer to me is someone who develops logic, not some interaction with JavaScript.

As a front end developer this is a bit insulting. This idea that JavaScript developers are somehow "lesser" is tired and totally overlooks the complexity and challenge of modern web development.

The problem is that as a web developer you really need to know how to do all of these tasks. I'm required to make mock ups, write business logic and all of the CSS design.

> This idea that JavaScript developers are somehow "lesser" is tired and totally overlooks the complexity and challenge of modern web development.

Wait, where did I say that? Wouldn't you say "develops logic" is develompent work, even on the front-end? I was contrasting it with "click button, accordion collapses".

One who is translating a mockup into HTML/CSS isn't "designing" anything, at least not in the sense that most people associate with the word.

I agree that they are separate roles though.

Thing is I've never met anyone who enjoys the so-called "designer" role. Translating a mockup means dealing with CSS which is a pain in the ass, there's no creativity, and it's not intellectually stimulating work. Add to that the fact that the "designer" role is often treated as low status/prestige and it's difficult to get people to do it.

It seems like the kind of role that companies should just outsource.

What I was getting at is that where I work the designer does both the mockup and the HTML/CSS transposition. But reading the other comments in the thread I gather this is not the norm.

Yea I've never worked at a company where the designer was also doing HTML/CSS.

Probably the UI Designer should be the one converting to HTML/CSS.

I've never worked at a company where the designer was also doing HTML/CSS. Design and HTML/CSS are totally different skillsets. I'd be impressed if a designer also knew how to write HTML/CSS for responsible websites/webapps, especially CSS and it's nonsensical rules.

>The two are very different roles which can rarely be fulfilled by a single person. I think we should stop trying to bundle them into the same thing.

I don't know if this is universally true. While there may be some cases where splitting up the the visual elements from the API calls is necessary for a company/team, I don't think it's common. The problem with that division is that while it may make the scope of development smaller for each developer, it makes the process of implementing features harder. Unless you work on some monolith service that handles hundreds of UI changes and has an (overly) complicated backend API, or you are super short on devs, I'm not sure it makes sense to dedicate one person fully the role of 'html/css/js dev' and 'front end api dev'.

CSS/HTML/JS animations/interactions are pretty trivial to implement. The bulk of being a 'front end developer' is getting the visual components to talk to the backend-api.

Furthermore, I think the more we (as a community) define this developer roles into sub-roles, we ourselves a disservice. It makes the recruiting landscape more hellish (no 'front-end api developer' title on your resume? Guess you won't get past the robots even with 10 years fullstack experience).

Probably "frontend api dev" doesn't fully describe what I meant. The point I'd split the two roles is in an environment where it's a client side application being built as opposed to a website. That's the point when being good at making things look right visually, and making them work coherently and in a maintainable manner, becomes a skill in itself.

I don't see why the developer that builds the interaction with the backend can't be given directly the design and turn it into HTML and CSS himself.

I wouldn't expect the developer to be able to come up with a good web design with the right choice of colors, spacing, etc. but I would expect that given a design he can both turn into HTML and CSS and split it into components.

That is how we organized in several teams I've worked, and there was never any issue.

I have seen however developers who do frontend work who know hardly any CSS and are even proud of it, and that is just not productive.

I used to work in an architecture team and sometimes I would get support requests from development teams because someone couldn't move a button 30px to the right, literally.

I think if someone is a frontend developer, they should be able to write their own HTML and CSS, besides knowing Javascript and a framework like React, Angular or Vue.

> I don't see why the developer that builds the interaction with the backend can't be given directly the design and turn it into HTML and CSS himself.

Because well-engineered HTML and CSS that works across all major browsers and can handle everything from tiny phones to high res desktop sizes and meets accessibility requirements is a very difficult skill to acquire. In addition, that skill has very little to do with the skills required in more traditional programming languages, even JavaScript.

It's perfectly possible to have someone fulfill both roles (I do, but I'm the senior-most FE person at my company.) It just takes a long time to master both sides of that equation.

Everyone should be able to do basic HTML & CSS, but deep expertise as I described above requires either a specialist or someone with a lot of experience.

After building a full stack app (with limited users), what does the handoff look like?

You leave a comment saying what a variable does?

Also, does a Css/html dev have less prestige than a front end logic dev?

I'm admittedly an outsider, engineer by degree, but casual programmer of 10 years. I can do html/css for fun, logic takes music and caffeine.

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