Frontend careers in 2024

I must start with, who has been doing this sort of stuff for say, 20 years?

Alright, okay, that's quite a significant number of people.

How about maybe 10 years?

Alright, and how about 5 years?

Alright, so similar to 10 and 5, we're probably skewing to quite experienced people, which in our experience is what happens, because people don't train juniors.

It's a thing, right?

And if that's not I don't mean all people, if that's, you do train juniors, awesome, but I have in my experience, it's a very interesting thing that And that's part of this challenge, I think, that we don't, maybe it's because we're a relatively new industry and set of professions, but we don't seem to have a particularly well structured kind of pathway through this, and I think that is reflected in what Elly refers to, that we have this confusion about titles.

Ben, I guess you you've been through this, you've been here a while, you know what about Elly kinda resonated what Elly had to say, resonated with you.

Was there, did it, how did it compare, say when you were just starting out?

In some ways it's, it's disappointing that we are still talking about the devaluation of the role, because very early in my career, I had a boss make a haha only serious joke about the front end being the bimbo of the web world, and unfortunately, I've run into that many times.

It's I think people often undervalue things that they think they could do, or nephew syndrome.

They've got a nephew or a niece who can do it, so therefore.

And because, I'm a sucker for punishment, I got out of copywriting into the web, and copywriting everyone thinks they can write.

Pro tip, you can't.

I think this is the thing, that there's a perception for some people that it's easy, I'm not really sure where that comes from, and yeah, so I mean there's lots of things we can unpack, I think it's disappointing we're still having a conversation but at the same time we've still got to grapple with it, and there are some things where over the years I think that devaluation or the sting of it has driven me to also Get up in people's grill, frankly.

But I also knew I had to, some trade offs as you found you had to learn some things and there I think things that I resisted learning that I later realized you know what?

I had a big career, it's not a pivot, but I have a really big career change when I realized I was going to move out of Web and into software because I felt like they were converging and I've talked about this, in the past that's when I decided to go to Atlassian because, nothing by half measures but learning then how to do things like testing because we weren't doing that in the web industry.

We were a little bit wild west and I think there was some rigor that came across and so there have been good things that have come back the other way.

But there are still, I'm still in conversations even now where the way people talk about front end is unbalanced.

And yeah, that's frustrating, but look, we're all in this together, so let's talk about it.

Yeah, hopefully.

Yeah, so that is the aim of this.

Elly, did you, was there something?

Yeah, I think the, just what you said about, like, why do people think that CSS is easy?

I think, I can't remember who I heard this from, but, the rough idea is, writing your first few lines of CSS is pretty similar to writing your 10, 10,000th10 millionth line of CSS.

The syntax is easy to wrap your head around and get started with straight away.

And a lot of people then think that means, oh, all of CSS is easy.

But when you start thinking about CSS architecture and ways to manage things at bigger scale, or like making sure that you're keeping up to date and learning new features that get added, all of that stuff.

That's where it starts to add in the complexity.

And that is what is often missed by people who might think that CSS is easy.

I had someone summarise it beautifully once when they said, everyone's full stack until they need to debug CSS.

And then they go looking for a front end editor.

Exactly.

And then they just adopt Tailwind.

Or put it all in JavaScript because, I went to the, I went to the US for a few months in 2000, in the year 2000.

And it was just at the dot com boom.

Ask your grandparents if you don't know what that was.

It was cre, it was just crashing and it it was in, it was all, I think we were in a state of denial, but there were these ads on television and ask your grandparents about what television was and ads . But so it was, I think it was an IBM ad, but there were all these ads, so ads for FedEx and what, but it was all around the web and how the web was transforming the world, right?

And, but this was mainstream on mainstream television.

But this particular ad was IBM and then some crisis was happening in, in, in some, and people said, oh, where are the web designers?

And somebody said, oh, they're off snowboarding.

And the reason why I bring that up is that even then, there was this sort of idea that somehow web, it's not a new thing, right?

That somehow web design was for, frivolous, and there was all a bunch of weirdos who went off snowboarding, which was quite unusual in 2000 compared to now as well.

It's a long standing thing, this, and like sometimes I kind of despair.

How do we, how we break that?

So where you know, where do we get that credibility?

Is it, I've tried talking often with at universities, and, incorporating this work more deeply into like, computer science degrees or all those sorts of degrees and it's really not part of those degrees and maybe in some other people's experiences, but not in mine.

So where do we start?

I'm very happy for other thoughts in the room, because I'm literally speechless, which is rare for me, as you can probably tell.

So is that hand waved up there?

Diana, sorry.

Here, just, yes, you.

We want some help here, come on, help us out.

Yeah, I've been around since 2007, I remember when I first started, we were all web developers, and by the time I finished my first job, we had, back end developers and front end developers by around 2010, so it started to get a bit of a specialization.

But now I think it's probably all that.

I feel like the web these days, it's just, I know people talk about the enshittification of the web, everything's just I work for a government department as well, and they're just treating it as a piece of real estate, outside at the moment.

Yeah, I just find now it's like, all the new people they're hiring, assign them as like a site core dev, and then change their job description to a full stack developer.

You can get any developer to work on something right then and there, rather than the right person for the job.

That's some of my thoughts.

The thing about the design, I find, design gets treated seriously because probably because design, print, design's been around for centuries.

Computer science and software programming's been around probably since, I don't know, probably the last, depending on when you want to start sort of thing, that sort of more back end related, it's a bit more of an established science industry, designs, whereas front end we're skirting both sides of the divide, Maybe that's where the great divide, yeah, I don't know.

So maybe it's something quite new, and we don't quite, we can't quite give a name to it, and we can't quite, yeah.

I think there might be something to that, yeah.

And maybe over time, like maybe when the first engineers came out.

Centuries ago, bridges fell down and crashed with time, but eventually it developed its own standards, and now it's set in stone.

I'm wondering if the web will be going through this crazy, fast paced, uneven development, and then maybe, hopefully, sometime in the future, before I die, it might be a bit more, stable, like most other industries in society.

I think that's a good observation, that it is a field that has changed so, and we've even, we saw Ben this morning, and then the other Ben, apparently you've got to be called Ben to be, working in the industry, but, we have, and Keith talked a bit about it yesterday at Code Leaders, that we, have had these rapid, relatively rapid cycles in what is best practice and what the core technologies are over the last 30 plus years and perhaps less so in some of those other fields.

I don't know.

There's certainly questions we could probably all ask in our organisation when these roles change and titles are being defined because job titles, in any reasonably large organisation, there'll be process around how job titles get created and approved and advertised and this kind of thing and there will be, if you're not involved, find out who is and find out what their inputs are and also if you're expecting people to come into a full stack role with front end skill.

Go and ask the people doing the interviews how they are assessing that and chances are they're not.

Chances are it's backend is doing their very best to interview and they're covering what they're comfortable with.

They're not trying to do it intentionally, it's just, they don't actually have that skill, and they're not going to admit up front easily that they don't know how to do the front end, because then maybe someone will say, why do you have the full stack role?

You can really open up some big cans of worms, but I think it's that thing of, being curious, the seek first to understand, maxim, I forget which book that one comes from, but it's the whole thing of seek first to understand before being understood, find out what people's inputs are, how are they measuring these roles, what they expect of these roles, and then compare that with other roles in the organization because something I've I was talking to a few people about this, but I've had conversations where people would say, oh, we don't want to have everyone be too specialized Oh, by the way, we're now advertising for SREs and I'm like, that's a specialization.

So, what's our criteria for that specialization versus this one?

And to ask those sorts of questions knowing that they could be uncomfortable and also to give people the softest landing you can if they are in an area where they might have to admit that they don't know something.

Or to give a definition to say, all right, look, the area that you are full stack is that yes, you're writing JavaScript, you're not doing the UI side.

Can we split that up?

Can we change our understanding?

And maybe in the middle of that as well, we're not pitching the value of what we do as much as we should.

I think the illustration I can give that maybe weirds people out the most is I quite casually the other day mentioned that as a front ender, I always end up seeming to talk to lawyers.

And that sounds weird, but in just about every role, I've ended up talking to them about a licensing issue, the legality of publishing something, how we can track the IP, if you're trying to rebrand something, who owns the IP and who's allowed to ship it where, and these sorts of things.

These extra skills that front ends have always had, are we talking them up?

Or do we sit there and say we're just doing HTML and CSS?

I had a job title at one point which was developer brackets HTML and CSS.

Wasn't true.

So yeah, I guess it's a very long winded way of saying ask questions about the inputs and the measurements and see if there's an imbalance because organizations can often understand, they have the vocab to understand an imbalance.

And I have had to push back in a situation where someone was being forced to become full stack and someone else in that other team, sorry, in that same team wasn't being required to learn the front end side.

And once it was seen as an equity issue between those two roles, HR will change the way they're dealing with you very rapidly.

But you ought to be very sure of your territory.

Before we break, any other thoughts, any inputs?

I genuinely want some help here.

Sorry, we've had someone with a microphone and I've just been yammering for ages.

That's all good.

Diana, who we got?

Oh, yes.

Hi.

Similar to, continuing on in that thought, you mentioned calling yourself a designer, and I'm wondering, whether even this sort of code, sort of computer science background is really the type of background for this work.

Is there a reason, do you think there was a place for us to, instead of taking, instead of trying to, skill up the backend developers, skill up people who have a code background, to be looking at the communication design fields, looking at those who are doing that long running design education, and skilling them up with the tools of CSS and HTML in the same way that we skilled them up to use printing presses in the 1800s.

That's what happened in the 90s.

Something really, the people who were doing the web, I'm very unusual from someone of my generation web, of being a computer science background.

It, really was people coming out of desktop publishing, and, the new sort of digital creative types, and to some extent I, and, like the word, right now design, if we're in crisis, design is really in crisis.

I think it's deeply devalued.

As a career, as a profession, it's really struggling.

People with 20 or 30 years experience really struggling there as well.

Like in some ways, like aligning with design is probably, maybe that's part of the challenge here that we thought of as design.

I'm not for a moment thinking design should be devalued, and then there's a whole question of kind of the gendering of certain roles, and we tend to gender kind of the visual design aspect as more feminised, and those roles, you only have to look at statistics about how relatively well people are paid, there's a whole bunch of deeply complex political stuff going on there that we don't have time for, but when we've had a drink, it's the perfect time to talk about it.

I was going to say, get a beer in me and ask me about back end chauvinism.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Evan.

I was just, this is something I've been thinking about a lot over the last couple of years.

I had, I was in a job where my boss was like, I didn't do front end but was it hard to back end.

And I've heard that in lots of places.

I think one of the differences between front end developers is that They come from all kinds of backgrounds, like my background is visual arts.

And when we started 25 years ago, we did it because we were the people who put up our hand and said, I'll have a go.

And because of that, we don't have, I have a visual arts degree.

I don't have a computer science degree.

And so clearly I'm not any good at computer science.

And I think there's that, that might date heaping of the back end people with, because they have a computer science degree, even though they might not actually write that.

But I wouldn't say that.

But yeah.

Yeah.

And I do think there is something around that.

I think that, I have thought a lot about why is it the thing that users actually touch, which seems to be pretty critical to the kind of success of the organization because that's really how everyone buys everything, interacts with governments all the time and all.

Why is that the bit that is devalued, and then the kind of business logic stuff, and maybe there's, the back end, which typically is your business logic, and so why is that the stuff we value, It's interesting, is it because it is aligned with business, it's clear to business decision makers the value, whereas this stuff here, it's a lot harder to measure its value, despite all the surveys of you increase the performance of a website, you increase your revenue, or whatever it happens to be, right?

However the front enders are the ones who get in trouble when it doesn't work.

That's very true.

It's very true.

Alright, time for one or two more.

Thanks, Evan, for that.

One or two more observations.

Here's some, yeah, we'll go with Kevin and then we'll go I wanted to build on the aligning with design thread.

I've seen a parallel conversation in the design practices around full stack design as well.

I've met designers who are like, I'm a product designer, I don't want to have to learn CSS.

And I've learned very code savvy designers who love prototyping things.

Who say, I don't want to have to learn product design as a discipline.

And so I think there's a lot of these half step roles that are hiding that, formalizing them is a difficult thing and we have to, choose which ones we're going to invest in, but, yeah, I think it's interesting, I think there's probably at least room for one role halfway between product designer who doesn't care about the web platform, and, JavaScript developer who doesn't care about the web platform.

There's probably room for someone who cares about the web platform in between there.

Absolutely.

I think, really key point to that is that, yeah, it's not just development, it's not just design even, it really does stretch across a whole lot of industries.

I was having a conversation to my mum recently who's a librarian, and it's the exact same over there.

I expected to do everything right from A to Z.

Even stuff that yeah, they might have in some situations or there should be multiple roles for that it's just not the case anymore.

And yeah, it's interesting also just to an earlier point, with design and back end, I feel like a lot of these issues, I feel like they stem from the explain like I'm five descriptions of these areas like everyone looks at design goes.

Oh, yeah, you make the pretty things and you look at development You go.

Oh, yeah, you write the code you make the computer do a thing like that feels like the really core things that are causing these issues because if you're a developer Oh, you don't get to worry about UI and design and interaction and any of that because it's out of your area and vice versa.

Something aslalongese lines that I was thinking when, particularly the comments from Kevin as well, what it also means to know things is often very vague and I think that's another question we can ask is when someone says you have to know this skill or that skill, or be able to do this skill or that skill, is to take it beyond that very simplistic kind of level and say, to what level?

And to give you an idea of what I mean by that, I do think that designers should know a little bit of CSS, as in, they should have played with it at least at some point to have a bit of an idea of the shape of the thing.

Do I think they should have to ship it?

For their job, no, because that's a career change.

And I talked about this in another talk, you can look me up on Conffab, I've ranted at length.

But, the term that I came up with that was knowing to understand versus knowing to do.

And understanding the roles adjacent to you, I think is actually makes you a good whatever you are.

A back ender who knows a bit of front end is a good back ender.

You know what I mean?

But driving some more nuance with some of these is probably, if we often do have to simplify but sometimes we shouldn't, we should actually say this is really complex and you're either going to know this or you're going to make bad decisions.

Absolutely, and it plays into what you mentioned before about the interview process.

If you're getting a developer to interview someone who's coming in for a front end role and that developer is a full stack developer, but actually more likely a back end developer and they don't have an understanding of front end.

They can't be able to evaluate that correctly.

We've, in those moments as well, I think front enders have to take that really uncomfortable step and inject yourself into it and say, okay, if no one else is in there, evaluating that put me on the panel and I will, and that's the kind of thing sometimes where if we let it happen to us it will continue happening.

We're going to wrap it on that, but I guess, the lesson there is it's on us to, to reframe this, to get more involved in terms of shaping what this industry looks like, what the profession looks like.

That's the challenge I'm going to leave everyone with, but I will sweeten it with, we're going to have a break now, we're going to have a drink, bite to eat, enjoy this amazing museum, we've, I highly recommend, now you can't take food or drink down into the, Being exhibition.

So either go and have a look at that and then come back and grab a drink or grab a quick drink and have a look.

It's amazing, it's playful, it's joyful, it's creative technology and I don't like to, I'll leave you with this.

I would like to, one, part of my mission is to think of us who probably feel like we make relatively prosaic, functional things for the screen.

And then we have a world of people who make these extraordinary, creative, delightful things for screens, right?

And we probably think there's a long way from here to there, but many of the things we do are very similar.

And I'll leave you with this thought that cinema, whether it's like making Marvel, or making, much more kind of artistic, auteur driven work, those folks all think of themselves as doing the same thing.

And often will work on both kinds of films and so part of my mission and with Seb I've been talking quite a bit about this is to bring our world closer to that world and that world closer to us, right?

So that's one of the reasons why we're here.

So go and enjoy that, go and be inspired by that.

Continue these conversations and we'll look forward to seeing you again tomorrow morning where we kick off at 9.

The coffee will be going from about 8.30.

But for now, for their courage, in putting their head above, particularly Elly, as a relatively new person in the industry, to put your head above the ramparts, and I'm not sure what you expected, but many people I know have tremendous experience.

People who've helped drive the web for 20 years, whose names will be mentioned multiple times today, jumped in and, really supported Elly's position.

I saw it on LinkedIn and elsewhere it was published.

Tremendous thank you for that, and thanks Ben for your insights and thoughts.

Thanks all, thanks them both, and now let's go and grab a drink.