Yes, they don't know anything about development because they only know one language and they're spending loads of time doing non-engineering, i.e. HTML, CSS and dealing with browser inconsistencies. This is not revolutionary speak, it's been long known that mono-linguists tend to really suck at making things run fast, regardless of their dedication to using that one language.
No-one in their right mind ever called flash developers genius coders, in fact they were (generally rightfully) regarded more as designers than developers and yet that's exactly the same niche front-end devs occupy today.
I've seen it more than once now, massive load of javascript built around the 'recommended' design patterns that as soon as you turn back into simple functions and throw a few if statements into to stop them initializing every page load, boom, massive page load gain.
You can be an expert on hoisting and this and ES6 and still suck at engineering, in fact I've seen it more than once in multiple languages, guys who knew entire language specs and yet couldn't code their way out of a paper bag.
There are 4 types of front end dev:
1. Designer who can throw together a few scripts
2. Inexperienced developer/designer
3. Developer who happens to have moved to javascript with basic design skills
4. Unicorn who's great at design and development
Everyone thinks they're 3 & 4s, in reality 95% of front end developers are 1 & 2s.
Half the things that get posted here that have dedicated front end devs are juddering, slow, scroll jacking monstrosities. Don't try and tell me that's not the present state of the front-end development, because we all know the reality is there's very few, actually good, front-end developers out there.
You can get a back-end developer to do front-end. He might lack the experience to deal with some gotchas or browser compatibility but it's nothing that can't be solved with a simple Google search.
A front-end developer doing back-end, on the other hand, might not work as well.
In my experience they often fail to come up with anything remotely modular on their own, write maintainable code, understand the design concepts of more "advanced" frameworks like Angular or doing anything different than copy-pasting some jQuery snippet they found on yahoo answers.
It's not that JavaScript forces you to write spaghetti code, it's just that until very recently it was mostly written by clueless morons that didn't know any better.
How can you write your front-end in something like Reagent if most of your staff get micro-strokes when being asked to type {{ }} instead of <%= %> in your new template system or go la la la can't hear you when you mention the merits of CSS preprocessors?
Fortunately this is all changing as the result of front-end these days getting more "mentally stimulating" thus capturing the interest of back-end developers (the ones that more often than not happen to have degrees).
No-one in their right mind ever called flash developers genius coders, in fact they were (generally rightfully) regarded more as designers than developers and yet that's exactly the same niche front-end devs occupy today.
I've seen it more than once now, massive load of javascript built around the 'recommended' design patterns that as soon as you turn back into simple functions and throw a few if statements into to stop them initializing every page load, boom, massive page load gain.
You can be an expert on hoisting and this and ES6 and still suck at engineering, in fact I've seen it more than once in multiple languages, guys who knew entire language specs and yet couldn't code their way out of a paper bag.
There are 4 types of front end dev:
1. Designer who can throw together a few scripts
2. Inexperienced developer/designer
3. Developer who happens to have moved to javascript with basic design skills
4. Unicorn who's great at design and development
Everyone thinks they're 3 & 4s, in reality 95% of front end developers are 1 & 2s.
Half the things that get posted here that have dedicated front end devs are juddering, slow, scroll jacking monstrosities. Don't try and tell me that's not the present state of the front-end development, because we all know the reality is there's very few, actually good, front-end developers out there.