The pain in the ass of being a front-end engineer

And how to avoid it

It started as a compromise dated 2 years back, when I was a Cornell fresh graduate, from a major called information science of its first year harvest MS students — students behind its name studied the interaction between people and technology, then lingered at the intersection of the career choice between design and engineering.

Being reasonable enough, I picked front-end engineer, with the belief that it lies right at the intersection of design and engineering.

Very soon, I started to feel the many pains in between, which depicts as the following:

1. Back end engineers hold the belief that front end engineers are lack of computer science fundamentals because they do not work on the back end..
2. When a bug is found, everyone intuitively believes it’s introduced by the front-end because ‘clearly it doesn’t look correct on the UI’..
3. It is hard to find the value of a front-end engineer — the look and feel success are clearly by the designers, the content success is clearly attributed to the content strategist, and the performance success is too trivial to mention..

Is it possible to be front end engineer without the pain in the ass? Please try the following ideas:

1. Work on both front end and backend. So that to eliminate the data communication and mental barrier between the two.
2. Refuse to claim any bugs by being a experience developer that only gives the mockup, and leave all the rest of the production build up to the back end engineers who clearly should know how to deal with the easy work.
3. Work on both front end and design. So that the front-end success (if happens) is clearly attributed to you.

Let me know how does those work out for you! Don’t let them tell you that No Ass Pain No Gain!