Are front-end job titles and descriptions a problem?

[laras126]

Are they a problem?

I want to make sure I'm not the only one having issues here. I believe they are a problem because they are too general. The skill-sets associated with front-end development have become so vast that it is unreasonable to expect extensive JavaScript and CSS expertise from the same person, for example.

Agree or disagree? Please elaborate on your thoughts, and engage in productive and friendly discourse.

[armaneous]

To me, it seems like a runaway train-like issue. The term "front-end developer" is a relatively recent incarnation of the '90s and early 2000's term of "web designer" ("back-end" used to be "web developer"). As the web has gotten more complex and more people ventured into it, there's been a refinement on proper ways of doing things and dealing with scalability and maintainability. That led to the broadening of responsibilities for both ends of the pipeline.

The "back-end" became more refined and formalized and had a best-practices that just followed basic software principles that were already in circulation for over a decade. The "front-end" started down the Javascript route since that's the only real programming language available on the front-end, and that was fine at first. Then more complicated things were desired which necessitated frameworks and the massive ecosystem that JS now provides. Before long, it was easy to ignore the markup (HTML) and styling (CSS) because you could do all that with JS anyway. That's when you started seeing developers use JS for styling and formatting... cringe

I think this really creates three layers of development. A back-end, as traditionally defined/delegated; a middle, that's currently labeled "front-end" with expectations of JS mastery at the expense of HTML/CSS proficiency; a front-end, that specializes in HTML/CSS and general UI design.

[samwainford]

As university IT faculty teaching web and mobile I've been doing serious content analyses research on job postings to figure out what skills I should be teaching. The job title issue turned out to be one of the most interesting parts of my research and most difficult to categorize. Once I grouped the job titles into meta-title classifications, I extracted the skills listed in the job ads. After collecting and analyzing over 1000 job summaries (2015) that mentioned both web and mobile, the greatest demand turned out to front-end. If you are interested in the method I used and the results with comparison charts, see my site where I have shared the study: What Skills Gap Exists in Web and Mobile Development?. I processed over 1500 job summaries again in 2017 for comparison, with initial findings that demand for front-end has increased.

My research shows what job titles employers are using to advertise for web workers, not necessarily what the job titles should be for the skills they want.

It's good to know that someone else is just as concerned with this job title issue as I am!

Sam Wainford

[laras126]

@samwainford Thank you SO much for sharing your research! I'm digging back into this topic after doing a bit of research myself – more on the technical side, figuring out how skills in HTML/CSS relate back to programming and Computer Science at large. I'm looking forward to spending some time digging through your work – I think we are on to something here!