[ckorhonen]

This seems fairly typical, and I understand the rationale on both sides.

In any kind of engineering role, not just front-end, having domain experience/expertise certainly helps you be more productive from the get go. In a previous company we hired developers with good CS chops but no iOS experience to build our iPhone app - they picked it up, but it took a couple of years and numerous rewrites to get an awesome product. Thats a huge opportunity cost. You'll end up with a better product right off the bat if you hire an expert, especially with technologies which have a ton of quirks and nuances.

So why wouldn't you want to hire a front-end expert? In a lot of smaller companies flexibility can trump expertise - having an engineer who is smart and can work across the entire stack is essential in smaller teams. That doesn't mean they won't be primarily doing front-end development, but its helpful if they know their way around the back-end to some extent without hand-holding from other engineers. A good candidate needs to be smart enough to quickly pickup new tools and techniques, and it is important to determine this in the interview process.

[mackey]

I was just thinking about the similarities in iOS development. I have worked on a project where the original authors weren't iOS developers but were very competent front end developers, and it wasn't pretty. It doesn't just affect the code, but also things like the build environment and documenation.