[hombre_fatal]

How is this different from any build engineer? For some reason we generally accept that client development isn’t trivial except when it’s a web client, then it somehow must always be trivial despite it being the platform that must deal with things like application payload optimizations and work on every device. Meanwhile look how busy the rabbit hole of Xcode config on a complex app can keep an engineer for a single iOS app, and we seem to just accept it because it’s not web, and web = bad.

So, we make fun of a company that is serious enough about their web client to have a fulltime build engineer while we lament how little thought and care seems to be put into so many web clients in the wild. Maybe it turns out that clients aren’t always trivial and some specialization / division of labor is what it takes to make a good product.

It wasn’t long ago that you could see HNers snicker about fulltime “front-end developers”. I mean, isn’t it just HTML and CSS? How hard could it be? Isn’t the server API the only hard part of building a rich client??