Is front-end development having an identity crisis?

Front end development has gone from being just HTML, CSS, and Basic Javascript /jquery to HTML, CSS, Javacript front end frameworks, Javscript backend frameworks and javascript packeages (wepback, babel, and NPM)
I read this article and a lot of what was said about the radical changes in javascript really resonated with me. Shouldn’t front end development be standardize. Have we as developer failed become too complacent.
Please let me know what you think about the article. I have provided the link down below.

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Front-end development is standardized: on HTML5, of which JavaScript is a part. The article is really complaining that there’s a lack of uniform understanding of what the role of “Front End Developer” really is, not the lack of uniformity across frameworks. But guess what, that’s true in ALL application disciplines: how many disparate frameworks could one name for “Backend Developer” after all? Let’s see, there’s languages like Java, C#, PHP, Python, just to name a few, plus the whole ecosystem of vastly-differing frameworks for those. Devops jobs might have to know Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes, and so on, but no one shop is going to use all of those together.

Not all jobs are the same, and “Front End development” is no different. Perhaps the answer here is that job titles should just be more specific.

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Yes, I believe so, and the reason is that Front End development has evolved and will continue to evolve. It is much more complex these days and there are a lot of technologies one has to know and learn, those who do not keep up with current trends and market demand will lag behind.

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I am getting back on my dev journey after some life happened. I talked to a VRChat dev who told me that while I was away full-stack became legacy and now people really just specialize into front or back end because of the complexity of all the testing and bundling on both front & back end. too much complexity for one person to effectively do both on enterprise teams.

I wont say the guy is complaining. I think he makes a great point, especially when HR people dont seem to be able differentiate between the work of a front and a back end developer.

In reality, how many frameworks and languages do you think a frontend person is supposed to learn especially someone new to the field. It is one thing ti have JS6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, it is another thing to be expected to learn webpack, babel, and NPM and node.js.

And on-top of that we supposed to learn other programming languages. Aren’t we becoming jack of all trade.

Talking about the languages we can do it all with only JS [even back-end], and of course HTML and CSS but they are not programming language they are markup and style sheet languages. No need to learn many languages for front-end and JS is our only choice.

The “problem” is that within the core tech which is HTML, CSS and JS there are many concepts, methodologies, and standards we need to know and learn in order to deliver a proper functioning web app that can be scalable. Apart from knowing Git, GitHub, Terminal, Design Patterns, etc…

Node.js is only needed for back-end, and for back-end we have a lot of options [Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, C#/.NET] So pick your weapon of choice but ideally, we want to choose a language that is in demand and we enjoy programming and working with.

Now talking about JS front-end frameworks/libraries in my view we only need to know one well no need to know them all because once we know one we will be able to pick others when needed, and of course it is a good idea to choose between those that are in demand that means: React, Vue and Angular.

Tooling there is quite a bit of stuff we need to learn for the current modern development workflow such as Webpack, Babel, npm, Jest but once we are comfortable with the core technologies it should not be a problem to learn and get familiar with those.

About becoming the jack of all trades yes and no, because it is going to depend on where we will be working if it is a small start-up or freelancing then yes likely that we will be doing it all at some point or another like UI, UX, Front-end, Back-end and DevOps. In mid to large companies is more unlikely that we will be doing it all.

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