That title is from the opening tweet of a thread from Benjamin De Cock. I wouldn’t go that far, myself. What I like about the term is that ‘Front-End’ literally means the browser, and while the job has been changing quite a lot — and is perhaps fracturing before our eyes — the fact that the job is about doing browser work is still true. We’re browser people. This was a point I tried to make in my “Ooooops I guess we’re full-stack developers now” talk.
I really like Benjamin’s sentiment though. There is a scourge of implementations of things on the web that are both heavier and worse because they re-implement something that the browser offers better and “for free.” Think sliders: scrolling behavior, snap points, fixed/sticky positioning, form controls, animation, etc.
Our industry seems to have acknowledged that backend and frontend developers require very different skills (even though they often use the exact same language), and yet it’s struggling to see there’s too much bundled into the term “front-end developer”.
That’s the tricky part. That’s at the heart of The Great Divide. There’s an awful lot of front-end developers where their job solely focuses on JavaScript. You could call them “JavaScript Engineers” or “JavaScript Developers,” and that feels OK. However, I’m not sure what you call someone who’s a great front-end developer, not particularly focused on JavaScript, but is on other aspects of the front end.
The modern frontend developer is most often than not a “Jack of all trades” mastering JS (or even just a framework) and barely tolerating HTML/CSS as a necessary evil. That’s understandable. I strongly think it’s a different specialization, and it’s too much for a single person.
Yep, it’s OK! The divide isn’t a bad thing; it’s just a thing. Front-end teams need JavaScript specialists and CSS specialists and accessibility specialists and performance specialists and animation specialists and internationalization specialists and, and, and, and. They don’t have to all be separate people. People can be good at multiple things. It’s just exceptionally rare that people are good at everything, even when scoped only to front-end skills.