What is a front-end developer anymore?

I’ve had an interesting set of conversations on Twitter lately about the definition of a front-end developer. Usually, it means someone who deals with HTML, CSS, and JS. But lately it seems that every job advertisement for front-end developer is really only looking for a Javascript framework developer – which is not the same thing. I’m wondering if this is what’s responsible for the rash of badly coded websites. When companies and clients only concentrate on the coolest JS framework – be it React, Node, Yarn or whatever, and don’t care about the actual code it produces – we get lots of websites that are easily breakable and inaccessible.

In order to call yourself a front-end developer – you must be proficient in CSS and HTML. And I’m not talking Bootstrap and HAML and Sass – I’m talking barebones, in the weeds, plain HTML and CSS. Without the knowledge of what’s powering these frameworks, you get yourself into a pickle and end up spending more money trying to fix something that shouldn’t have been broken in the first place. By hiring someone who only really knows Javascript – you’re basically buying a car from someone who only knows how to create tires. You forget about the 80% of rest of the website – so you end up with websites that end up being nothing but blank screens because someone forgot a semicolon somewhere.

It would be great if tech job websites would start separating these two (and they’re often two very, very different jobs) in their search filters. And please, employers, if you only want someone who works in React, advertise for a React developer. Advertise for a Javascript developer. Don’t advertise for a front-end developer when that person will rarely/never/hopefully not write any HTML and CSS. And please hire a second person for that job. You probably wouldn’t hire someone who did database management to also be your IT person. Sure the jobs are somewhat related, but they’re both completely different fields with distinct expertise each.

I’ve been coding in front-end development for 5+ years now, and while I’m confident I could learn to be a React developer pretty easily – the fact is that I’m not one right now. But you could give me any design and I could translate that to a well-coded, accessible, maintainable, responsive website. But can a JS-only-ish developer do the same thing?

So please stop asking for front-end developers when you want a JS developer. And for the love of good code and sanity, stop asking for full-stack developers (that’s another rant for another day -I agree that there’s no such thing as a full-stack developer and it’s a myth).