The line has definitely gotten blurry for me very fast in my career. Most of my work as a front-end dev is making UI changes and getting things responsive and accessible. But I increasingly get tasks focused mostly or entirely on back-end changes, such as recently adding model validations to our Ruby on Rails backend.
My rule of thumb for things outside one's speciality is "knowing enough to be dangerous." I try to know enough about Ruby and the Rails framework so I can grasp basic functions and infer how something works by reading it over. I still needed some help to get those validations right, but they were small corrections and not the "you need to do things an entirely different way" kind of feedback. Following this rule I've been helping to blur that front-end/back-end line, but I honestly think that's inevitable for development teams. The rate of change today has just accelerated that.
I would say my front-end title speaks more to my speciality than as a limit to my skills. I learn the most about CSS and JavaScript, but that doesn't mean I won't write Ruby scripts or side-projects either. Semantically, I think web developer titles will communicate more "I focus mostly on this along with other needed skills" instead of "I do this and nothing else."
The downside is how this encourages the "full-stack" myth. Helping more people understand that knowing at least the basics of everything doesn't automatically make them qualified for "full-stack" is a huge challenge.
The line has definitely gotten blurry for me very fast in my career. Most of my work as a front-end dev is making UI changes and getting things responsive and accessible. But I increasingly get tasks focused mostly or entirely on back-end changes, such as recently adding model validations to our Ruby on Rails backend.
My rule of thumb for things outside one's speciality is "knowing enough to be dangerous." I try to know enough about Ruby and the Rails framework so I can grasp basic functions and infer how something works by reading it over. I still needed some help to get those validations right, but they were small corrections and not the "you need to do things an entirely different way" kind of feedback. Following this rule I've been helping to blur that front-end/back-end line, but I honestly think that's inevitable for development teams. The rate of change today has just accelerated that.
I would say my front-end title speaks more to my speciality than as a limit to my skills. I learn the most about CSS and JavaScript, but that doesn't mean I won't write Ruby scripts or side-projects either. Semantically, I think web developer titles will communicate more "I focus mostly on this along with other needed skills" instead of "I do this and nothing else."
The downside is how this encourages the "full-stack" myth. Helping more people understand that knowing at least the basics of everything doesn't automatically make them qualified for "full-stack" is a huge challenge.
I agree with everything you just said 😁
It's a good way to think of it as a specialty, rather than the only thing you can do.