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Comment by iteratethis | Hacker News Reader

You're wrong.

App/mobile and web developers are stretched beyond belief as it comes to skills expected of them. This handbook gives a reasonable overview of the scope of a front-end developer:

https://thoughtworksinc.github.io/front-end-handbook/en/

Yet it's still incomplete, most of the cloud stuff isn't even included.

We're over-asking people. Take Spotify. Has an army of quite decent engineers. They had to actually build a homegrown platform to shield developers from the ops tooling madness. The average developer struggles to understand just git. Even senior ones do.

Front-end developers were a joke 20 years ago. Not taken very serious, not "real" developers. Now it's one of the most complicated programming jobs there are. You have to know...everything.

As for performance, there I do agree that a programmer has a responsibility.

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I’d urge you to not so flatly dismiss someone’s opinion as wrong. The situation is obviously (I would think) more nuanced than that.

I’d also argue that if a senior developer does not have control over their VCS, they should rethink their title.

These are tools in a toolbox - you don’t need to be an expert in all of them, but seniority requires, at a minimum, proficiency.

Not to dismiss your opinion, but for someone arguing in favor of nuance, your perspective on seniority is surprisingly... un-nuanced. So a senior is not a senior if they are not proficient at Git? How do you even measure that proficiency?

EDIT: FWIW, I don't value titles like "senior" and never took them to be meaningful.

> So a senior is not a senior if they are not proficient at Git?

In my opinion (for whatever that's worth!), no (although I would say VCS in general, not git specifically). I personally consider being able to properly version control your code to be a critical skill when it comes to development - regardless of your place on the stack. YMMV.

> FWIW, I don't value titles like "senior" and never took them to be meaningful.

I don't necessarily disagree with regard to the current state of the industry, however as a proponent of development having more professional standards I still believe that we should be attempting to find some common ground on the standards of proficiency and mentorship.

While I agree that there is a lot to frontend development, that list is ridiculous. It is useful as far as knowing what categories of things you may come across at some point. But as far as things you need to know? This is significantly overstating it.

The point being that all of those topics are a potential area to deep dive. The previous poster is disappointed that not everyone happens to deep dive on his specific area of interest, while there are likely a hundred areas other people are experts in that he has not done a deep dive for.

Given time you will come across almost all of them. And you're expected to rapidly pick up any gaps you may have in that list.

For the simple reason that on most teams, there's no other person.

It's a pretty fair list of things I have come across in my career. As lead, it's my job to know at least generally about all these things, and for many to have deep experience and intuition into others.

The breadth of my frontend career has only kept expanding over the last 10 years, it's definitely harder than when I started.

This whole post was great except for the first sentence.

I'm getting old and I feel overwhelmed by the creep of "stuff" that I need to know. For me, it used to be UNIX + C + bash shell was enough to survive. My only defence is to write a small Wiki page for each category of "stuff". After a year on the job, I have built an organic encyclopedia that I can quickly search to remind me about "stuff" that I use infrequently.

And, to be fair, holy shit is modern web programming complicated. I am consistently amazed by the results on a wide variety of platforms.

EDIT

Wow, the link that you shared is amazing. Very well written. Thank you to share.

I don’t think having a breadth of knowledge in frontend, backend, and cloud infra is too much to ask.

Think of how much is asked from other white collar professions such as law and medicine.

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