On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 12:18 PM, Jonathan Duncan <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I think this is what happened to many a good front-end developer. I started > on the front-end and did not see any room to grow (this was years ago) and > moved into back-end. It is unfortunate because now front-end developers now > need to be dedicated to front-end development. And I agree 100% that > front-end dev work should be paid just as much as back-end devs. >
I'm working on an interactive web app as a hobby project, and yeah, today's front ends are getting pretty sophisticated. In some ways, things are easier. jQuery makes things that used to be hard almost trivial. But then you can see openings for new kinds of interaction in the browser, and those previously impossible things are now possible but really, really hard to get right, especially if you have to integrate with a legacy web site or deal with old browsers, broken proxies, etc. Anyway, there are now libraries and frameworks for stuff that runs on the front end in the browser, and although they make things easier, the space is new and the frameworks are not yet mature and it's sort of an explosion of cool ideas so that it's difficult to figure out which will survive in the long term and become the new jQuery that you can depend on. It's actually a really interesting platform from a software system design perspective now, and there are some forward-looking places that treat it seriously and will pay accordingly, but it's hard to get companies used to paying peanuts for "web front end" work to realize that they're dealing with something fundamentally different with modern web front-ends. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
