Finding developer = grey hair
Out of context: Reply #11
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- stewdio0
To be serious for a moment, I think finding a "good" front-end coder may be more difficult than finding a good back-end coder. (Regardless of which job you think is more difficult.) If you have the chops to do both you get pushed into doing back-end work because it pays more, is a more efficient use of your time, and the problems are more interesting to solve. (For example "what's a nice conceptual model for this database" vs "why is this aspect of the layout not working in this supposedly standards-compliant browser?") And this is strange if you have a foot in both worlds—programming and design—because it means those two worlds become a little further separated for you each year. You're only going to meet so many people in your life who you debate with about what Tschichold's preferred programming language might have been based on the language's code punctuation and whitespace standards.
And unfortunately the way we've set up design markets and education systems doesn't encourage that kind of blended talent set. I mean... the project brief says you need an art director, a producer, a designer, and a programmer to accomplish what you're pitching to the client. It never says "we need four people who can each do all of the above (to varying degrees of course) and can be left to their own autonomy while brainstorming lest we dilute good ideas simply because three of the four don't have the background to grasp what the other is saying." (And does the client have the budget for four of those people anyway?)
This is what makes me wish I had a time machine so I could go work at SRI and Xerox PARC back in the day. A nicely funded shack far away enough from the parent company that mom and dad aren't constantly badgering with questions about immediate commercial applications, they're just sending checks. And you know what? Those guys invented the mouse, the graphic user interface, Arpanet, email, hypertext, video conferencing, document sharing, etc, etc. Ok, I admit that's an overly utopian view of how PARC operated but we've got to have dreams yea?
So yea... you just send me and benfal that check for 30,000,000 USD that we discussed above and we'll write your HTML. And then use that to fund a new research center with no goals and no clients. Just play space for inventing fun new things.