The web is a harsh manager
I am in the middle of writing a blog post that is similar to this. My post even also references The Great Divide.<p>However, my conclusions are different. I think the main problem with front-end today is the complexity of the tooling and the lack of specification updates to implement successful concepts that would allow the removal of frameworks and tooling. I think many of the tasks he describes in this post would cease to exist entirely if we began focusing on implementing things directly into specs and aggressively sunsetting the use of frameworks and tooling.<p>We have to get away from everything is Javascript and an abstraction land. If a front-end developer didn&#x27;t have to learn frameworks and how to debug Webpack configurations, they might have more bandwidth to learn how to write HTML properly.<p>I think he sets up kind of a straw man here. There are a lot of front-end developer roles that are just straightforward JavaScript programming with some domain specific knowledge of Web APIs and frameworks. Then there are front-end developer roles that include the more nuanced stuff he talks about, but I don&#x27;t think there are a lot of companies plopping all of this disparate stuff into one person&#x27;s lap.<p>The real problem is that in 2014-2015, Front-End Developer stopped meaning &quot;A person with an eye for design and detail who can write clean markup and CSS and add some interactivity to a webpage with JavaScript&quot; to &quot;Classical software engineer who writes code in JavaScript&quot;. This transition happened because of the mass move to single page applications. But organizations still need people who can do what the previous incarnation of front-end developer did, even if they don&#x27;t know it. They just don&#x27;t have a standardized name for the role.<p>And as someone who has been both versions of front-end developer (I successfully transitioned when I saw the writing on the wall but one look at my personal site should tell you I&#x27;m of the old guard.) I think there is a possible version of Front-End Developer in the future that is somewhere in the middle. Truly balanced. Right now things are just too heavily weighted in one direction. I don&#x27;t think the right move is to necessarily create a bunch of other roles. If that was going to catch on, I think it would have already.