Item — HN Reader

I'm not sure this is the person we should listen to on engineering management. This quote is a huge red flag to me:

"I advise developers, anytime they’re looking at job ads, serious developer positions, not front end developers..."

How can he retain great front end engineers if he doesn't even think it's a "serious" position? I've done machine learning, kernel hacking, back end, mobile, and front end, and it takes just as long to learn to be amazing at front end as it does to learn any of the other categories.

2 comments

I feel like he's confusing "front end developer" with "front end DESIGNER". The mention of Photoshop seems key. I don't think it was meant to be a slight to those using Javascript on the front end, so much as those who know only the barest scraps of Javascript, and mostly spend their time in image editing, with a bit of HTML and CSS thrown in.

You reacted too quickly - the front end part is important to the rest of that quote. Some people (not me personally) consider Photoshop and a small amount of photo editing (think cropping/resizing) as a legitimate part of front-end work. So it can make some sense to ask for that in a front-end dev. But it doesn't make sense if you're trying to hire someone to work on an API or something, to ask them to also be good with Photoshop.