I think you misunderstood his point, I think what he's saying is that even good back end devs are horrible at designing UI and you need different people with different specialisations on a team.
I'm horrible at designing UI too. That's simply not the job of building modern interfaces across multi-disciplinary teams.
I care far, far more about data-structures, eventual-consistency, data-design, and types than CSS and divs.
These days getting the design to look nice is my two-hour reward for nine days of data-stitching hell, writing backend-for-frontend lambda functions, and negotiating API contracts that actually support the product I've been asked to build.
We need to stop assuming that just because a programmer works on client code, that they are in any way less capable that a programmer that works on server code. My point stands: It's absolutely toxic to collaboration, which is the key to success.
I think he was saying that the GUI programmer doesn't need to know how to use a profiler for their work to be valuable, and that if you're good at optimizing you don't need to know how to choose tasteful colors for your work to be valuable. My reading is the opposite of your reading.
I care far, far more about data-structures, eventual-consistency, data-design, and types than CSS and divs.
These days getting the design to look nice is my two-hour reward for nine days of data-stitching hell, writing backend-for-frontend lambda functions, and negotiating API contracts that actually support the product I've been asked to build.
We need to stop assuming that just because a programmer works on client code, that they are in any way less capable that a programmer that works on server code. My point stands: It's absolutely toxic to collaboration, which is the key to success.