Someone told me recently that at his company, the front-end work is where they put all the sub-par engineers, because they don “t like firing people, and they just want to give them a crappy job that has no advancement capabilities and no real responsibility so they “ll :
- Not be in charge of anything actually important
- Eventually get bored and quit on their own
It “s the equivalent of putting people “on the roof” in the show Silicon Valley.
I laughed at that, because it was at once the most obnoxious and elitist thing I “d heard come out of a back-end dev “s mouth in a while. And so, so wrong.
Front end work is what people see.
Customers care about what they can see.
Customers are the people that pay you money.
Therefore, good front end developers are in high demand because their work is a quick way to raise customer happiness retention rates (making more money) and give the back end devs more time to make the infrastructure actually, you know, work.
I “ve seen really slick teams make money years ahead of actually having anything finished back end because of some great work done with front end only stuff. Heck, a lot of these cool new startups are just a really slick looking website with (gasp!) real people sitting behind them running around doing stuff manually. I know of one company that is building a vending machine but their MVP is just an ipad where you fill out a really cool looking form, and then less than a minute later someone comes up and hands you the thing you ordered.
The problem is that in order to come up with these amazing designs, you need to be creative. You need to be able to take someone “s vision – and it could be anything from “I “d like it to look exactly like this, this, and have this functionality” to “I want to create an experience that has never existed before and I “m majorly influenced by Pink Floyd” and get it onto the screen in a way that makes everyone happy.
It “s no small feat.
Finding a good one can mean the difference between your company being successful and being an also-ran.
Originally Posted: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-front-end-developers-so-high-in-demand-at-startups-if-front-end-development-is-relatively-easier-than-other-fields-of-engineering
Originally Posted On: 2016-08-29