One of the things I've observed around the terrible-toggle of Front-end/Back-end is that there are two different perspectives of it - from the technical-side and the business-side.
You've already touched on the technical-side, where you tend to find people that fit the Back-end profile (system-programmers, micro-services, "everyone should learn C as their first language", etc) that 'look down' on people that fit the Front-end profile (Web-programmers, mobile, "everything that can be written in JavaScript should be written in JavaScript", etc) as a lower class of developers. This is a well-worn topic that I don't have much to contribute to other than the fact that I think it's bunk. We're all trying to solve the same 2 hard problems - cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
But that's an us-vs-them story between equals. The other side is management-vs-employees.
Senior management, like executives, look at things with a much wider lens and cannot deal with all the minutia of who does exactly what. Anyone who has been involved in any sort of long term planning/scheduling has experienced the process of dealing with the concepts of Person-months or Full-Time-Employee (FTE) months estimates against available capacity. It's obvious that treating everyone as interchangeable cogs is fundamentally flawed and yet if you need to do this sort of planning and you have more than 5 devs you need to do some sort of abstraction and generalization. I think the Front-end-vs-Back-end is too high-level and too general a solution but if you need a few, simple terms for C-levels to use across the industry I don't have a better answer 😛.
I agree completely with it being more of an issue with management vs technical. Definitely not trying to have that same old discussion about front end vs backend.
I tend to think that most developers can work with what they are given, we’re all problem solvers!
I guess it’s that for planning purposes we need to fit under a certain label for various reasons, but it’s difficult when it’s such a broad spectrum.
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One of the things I've observed around the terrible-toggle of Front-end/Back-end is that there are two different perspectives of it - from the technical-side and the business-side.
You've already touched on the technical-side, where you tend to find people that fit the Back-end profile (system-programmers, micro-services, "everyone should learn C as their first language", etc) that 'look down' on people that fit the Front-end profile (Web-programmers, mobile, "everything that can be written in JavaScript should be written in JavaScript", etc) as a lower class of developers. This is a well-worn topic that I don't have much to contribute to other than the fact that I think it's bunk. We're all trying to solve the same 2 hard problems - cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
But that's an us-vs-them story between equals. The other side is management-vs-employees.
Senior management, like executives, look at things with a much wider lens and cannot deal with all the minutia of who does exactly what. Anyone who has been involved in any sort of long term planning/scheduling has experienced the process of dealing with the concepts of Person-months or Full-Time-Employee (FTE) months estimates against available capacity. It's obvious that treating everyone as interchangeable cogs is fundamentally flawed and yet if you need to do this sort of planning and you have more than 5 devs you need to do some sort of abstraction and generalization. I think the Front-end-vs-Back-end is too high-level and too general a solution but if you need a few, simple terms for C-levels to use across the industry I don't have a better answer 😛.
I agree completely with it being more of an issue with management vs technical. Definitely not trying to have that same old discussion about front end vs backend.
I tend to think that most developers can work with what they are given, we’re all problem solvers!
I guess it’s that for planning purposes we need to fit under a certain label for various reasons, but it’s difficult when it’s such a broad spectrum.