Discussion on ""So, what's your role?""

Robert van der Elst · 2016-05-27T12:39:17.882Z

Job titles. Everyone has one, probably self-assigned or made up by your company or by some weird manager who stays up at night making them up. When I began professionally in 2001 and you were a Front End Developer, you made the HTML and CSS and added...

i am working front end, NodeJs developer

"e-infrastructure developer" - lame ^__^

I'am The Front End Designer

I don't like applying the term Engineer with something that isn't practiced as an engineering discipline... Software development is usually an exercise as a craft discipline.

Aside from that, if you aren't writing a fair amount of code I wouldn't use the term developer, or would consider it a very jr position... what you are would be a senior web designer with some development skills. And there is nothing wrong with that.... working mock ups and demos are really helpful, and often all that is needed if it's mostly static or stand alone.

Just my $0.84 (inflation, you know)

Thanks for the reply (damn that inflation! ;) ). I see what you mean, but I don't mean it like an official engineering title you would get out of college. If people have other suggestions for that title, that's fine too. :) And just to clarify where I come from, I've been building websites from 2001, including PHP (and a bit of Javascript), so I have programmed in the past, but I've moved more to the design part of websites. UX/UI and design are now more my territory, but I still use code to make it visible and functional. :)

I know you didn't mean it as a degreed title, but in some states it's a legal requirement, and I just don't feel it's appropriate... Master Software Craftsman might be a better title.

Michael, I see what you mean. I don't want to create confusion in that part ;) How does Front End Mastermind sound? hahaha

"Back End Developer obsolete?" - I dont think so.

That was meant in a funny/sarcastic way ;) Good Back End Developers are very hard to find!

yeah, that's why we have our "own role".

It's an interesting point, i think nowadays the role of developer become so diffuse, because of course some developers a part of coding make some server admins tasks, and maybe some front end designes finish making some js code, for this reason i think you categorization is correct, but as developer you have to become some flexibility and don't fit in one exact role i think

Me for example, I'm a PHP Developer profile, but at least know about html, css, javascript, some things about linux/unix system, about control version and a little of vagrant. I think the more things you know the better, and the better you are in one or two things the best profesional you become

But Version Control is a tool, not a job profile.

Yes, I know. It's only an example of things that i use, maybe not the better.

(my opinion)

Anything with "designer" in it, isn't a coder. HTML / CSS could be considered fringe "coding" and with React, html is used in JS as JSX, so I'd consider that person a developer. Designers generally just design, with their primary tools being Photoshop, Illustrator, etc... where a developers primary tools are a text editor and an FTP client.

Even with NodeJS acting as a server in some situations, I still won't call a front end developer a full stack developer. As a full stack developer, your responsible for the full stack. Thus, this can include configuring your server environment, as well as everything else including but not limited to CDN, Load Balancer, DNS, file storage, any RDBMS, etc...

As you said, this can go on and on; there are people who only do systems administration and no programming - these are not developers obviously. There are people that only do development and no systems administration. These are not systems administrators or full stack developers.

I've never considered myself to have any specific title other then full stack developer - it's just about 10am here and since 5:30am I checked to make sure all the servers were healthy (systems admin), made sure all the emails that were supposed to go out, went out (sys admin), installed a new pc for an employee (help desk), configured a new pc (sys admin / help desk), ran a new network line (general contractor? hah) and now on to some development.

Yet your tagline says "Web Developer", haha. You might want to change that to "Full stack developer".

Thanks for your opinion, it's well appreciated :) Like I mentioned, I design a website completely with HTML/CSS/JS (jQuery), no Photoshop is involved. So am I a designer or a developer? The lines are getting more and more blurry, that's for sure ;)

Congratulations on your first story!

I think it'd be useful if companies and recruiters would embrace the three roles you described above. It would save people a lot of time! Thanks for your thoughts! 😉

Thanks! Well it's just my 2 cents obviously and it's not set in stone ;) Some people will agree, others will disagree.

Interesting read @Robert 😀

This is something we all have to deal with everyday. A few days ago in my startup, we were listing job roles in AngelList and we were damn confused - whether to write "Front-end Developer" or "Front-end Designer".

I think a person who codes and decides the layout of the front-end part should be called "Front-end Developer". If they code and prototype using Photoshop (or any other tools), should be called "Front-end Designer".

Those were my two initial types, but like I said there's so much middle ground, that a third type made sense :)

"I design a website completely with HTML/CSS/JS (jQuery), no Photoshop is involved. So am I a designer or a developer?" - your a developer. I do the same - designing websites without photoshop and I don't consider myself a designer.

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