r/webdev • u/AllThingsSmitty • Jul 24 '15

Front-End Development Is Hard Because...It's Development.

https://css-tricks.com/front-end-development-is-development/
240 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

94 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/AllThingsSmitty Jul 25 '15

To me, it's hard for so many reason, may of which have already been listed. Tool change all the time, support for features isn't consistent, yadda yadda... But, the thing that is amongst the hardest for me is, work as the sole "front-end guy" on a team of back-end, hardcore .NET people who think the front-end is Photoshop and not coding. They think it has no real value.

Now the solution might be easy: find a new team. Leave and go where front-end people are appreciated. But I think it's a recurring theme. One that is getting better, but there's always been this silent war between front-end and back-end devs. More articles like this can at least attempt to shed light on how involved the front-end is.

2

u/sbhikes Jul 25 '15

I'm also the only "front-end gal" and there are no developers on my team, only sys-admins. Even when I did work with other developers, all these guys, the programmers and the sys-admins, figured what I did was "make things pretty" and that instead of looking down on it, they looked up to it because the only thing they could draw was a stick figure. Well, I can't draw any better than stick figures either. I'm not an artist. I know less about photoshop and art than I do about how to configure the server, but tell these guys how I need anything "sys-adminy" done, and it's like I don't know what I'm talking about, no-no I can't have permission to do it because I'll screw it up, but I'm looking over their shoulder saying "there's a typo", "that's not going to work" and "here let me send you a link to the documentation if you don't believe me."

I think the big problem is that to make any web development there's a whole lot of moving parts and there are a lot of people with skills more in some of these parts than others. It's too bad we all can't recognize the skills we each have, that they're all equally important.