[FennNaten]

The thing is, considering the current state of web development, "front-end/back-end/full stack" labels just don't hold up. Knowing cache strategies, all the subtleties of consuming full blown services, orchestrating computing distribution, etc. used to be deemed "back-end" because the webserver did it. Now with service workers, background workers, fetch api, indexedb and many new browser apis and frameworks, you can run all that in a browser. Does that make it in fact "front-end stuff" ? And all the complex tooling to set to do efficient SSR/code splitting, with all this transpiling and bundling, forcing you to understand http, resource and module loading, file system, componentized architecture... Is it more "backendy"? I recently interviewed for a "full stack" job, first thing I did was asking what they imagined the daily tasks to be. Turned out, it was mostly about dealing with stuff involving data and request flow orchestration spanning on both services and browser, and wiring up some react components to handle the data flow / rendering. The "UI" components are handled by a team of specialists in UI/UX/semantics/accessibility/animation... So what should the job be called ? Client-server app developer? Glue developer? Backend guy who knows the browser as an app platform? Developer of all the stuff you can't see on screen? I've seen other companies using "full stack" for other meanings. "UI guy who knows how to deploy", "service guy who knows enough to diagnose and patch the front when UI guy has higher priorities", "guy who make templates render data", "guy who will be able to perform maintenance tasks accross all the layers while specialists handle the features"... So for me, the true problem is that we are collectively bad at describing what we do, and give to non-tech people some umbrella terms that spread more confusion.

[em-bee]

indeed.

a decade or so ago, we had designers who did html and css, and back-end developers who nudged the html into templates and did all the rest.

i used to be a classic back-end developer.

nowadays i am happy to code front-end, because my work hasn't really changed, it's just that many things that i used to do in the back-end are now done in the browser. i am still working with designers who do html and css, and i am still nudging the html into templates.

the one reason i don't like working with css is because most decisions to be made around it are design decisions, which, not having any experience in design are decisions i feel unqualified to make so i dread making them.