[dagmx]

But most frontend devs don’t need to do any of the things you’ve mentioned. By your own comment, they have a backend team who handle it and they work in concert. Would it be nice if they could understand each other better? Sure but most backend folks aren’t picking up JavaScript and UI frameworks either , or learning about browser tech.

And all the stuff you mentioned can be done by learning those skills on windows or Mac. Linux doesn’t really need to factor in, and now you’re saying to learn an entirely new operating system in addition to a new skillset.

You’re trying to say they should be more than what they are, but for a scenario they can’t predict coming up? In which case any number of other things might happen too, and there is likely already a team of people better suited to handle those issues. What would the sales pitch be to have someone learn it?

I think there’s an impedance mismatch between what you expect to provide value to someone as a hypothetical future goal and what they actually need to achieve their objectives.

[baq]

The sales pitch is the difference between being a programmer and an engineer: one writes code, the other solves business problems. The value delivered by good engineering may be less than a lucky coder who doesn't have time to learn the tools of the trade, but this is expected: engineering is making sure luck doesn't matter for the business, within the operational envelope and in the assigned budget.

Linux is important if that's what the backend deploys to. If it is, it's a part of the operational envelope - I am saying engineers should have familiarity with what production is running on. I don't particularly care where those skills are being picked up as long as you know that on the production box there's strace instead of dtruss and you know how to check what the D state process is waiting for or whatever interesting issue arises which only happens under load, with networked storage and with at least a couple dozen cpus. (This is also why I don't care for frontend devs to 'know Linux', but having some knowledge about HTTP and their production HTTP servers would be beneficial, as would be knowing that networks aren't magic...)