Stopping at my Front-End abilities... good career move?

Question

Just curious about what other front-end and back-end people think, career wise. Here's the details:

I'm a 30 yr old mom who is pretty good at front end development - that's my day job at an interactive agency. Don't have the money or time to go back to school or lots of high priced training sessions. I started out as a graphic designer ten years ago or so, then moved into database-backed web stuff, like CMS. I'm great at transforming PSD to a working html and css structure, especially for Wordpress themes. I enjoy this part of the process, probably because it's easy and fun, and as I learn a little more about jQuery and PHP, I can make it even better if I want or need.

I'm not sure where I should stop though, as far as my career goes. I don't know that I'll ever get to the point that I'm a great PHP developer or jQuery master. Is it lame to just be a front-end designer/developer? Can that be a successful career all its own? Or, should I obligate myself to learning the harder programming, if I'm capable?

Any advice or points any of you may have is appreciated!

Answer 1

This is not necessarily a bad career move whatsoever. For instance, I'm kind of a hard core developer, as I've developed my own tiny MVC engine for PHP, and also a way to generate an executable desktop application from web content, not unlike Adobe AIR. But for my day job, in the past 1.5 years, I've begun to focus on front-end development, particularly the ExtJS Javascript framework, and my rate just got bumped up over 20%

Answer 2

My advise is to follow your passion and do what you love, whether its sticking to only front end or learning back end development.

If you dont like what your doing with your career, you'll be miserable, no matter how successful you are. Strive to be both.

Answer 3

Lame? No. You're working. Sounds like the checks are clearing, so you're doing something well.

The biggest consideration we all face is keeping our skills marketable. Keep learning as much as you can. But remember that depth matters. If you just chase after every shiny new thing that comes along you might not end up with anything worthwhile. Pursue technologies that are fundamental. You'll go a long way with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and relational databases.

Answer 4

In many companies that have their own development teams, there can be a serious lack of good designers that can write beautiful HTML and CSS markup. In the smallest scale, it turns out that it works extremely well to have such a person work alongside a developer who loves nothing more than code and databases. You could be the design and UI expert which is such an incredibly important role. And the other developer can be the back-end code and database infrastructure guy that most people don't understand when you try to communicate with them.

So if you love doing the front-end aspect of things, then I do think you can make a long and successful career out of it. If you're interested in the deeper, wider category of UX design and can market yourself as a UX expert, I think that can be a highly sought after skill set, as well.

Answer 5

Please keep in mind that with front-end, like almost no other discipline in development, it is your insight and intuition that drive your value. Implementation will always play second fiddle to a good understanding of human nature in this arena. If you are successful at that, then learning new tools and tricks to become great at some form of implementation is simply icing on the cake.

Answer 6

As a freelancer myself, I find that front-end graphic/web design skills along with the ability to do basic CMS implementation and theming is by far the highest-demand technical skillset. It sounds like that's what you know and enjoy, so you're in a very good place professionally.

When the time comes that you run into a client who demands more functionality than your CMS of choice can readily provide and you need some modules written or a full custom app developed, you don't need to also be a back-end guru, you can partner with one. It's likely to be easy to arrange - those of us who prefer to avoid visual design work tend to be sick and tired of trying to explain what we do to prospective clients who think that the graphic layout is all there is, so if we don't do that, then we don't have anything to offer.

Answer 7

You should consider learning some backend stuff if time permits.

The reason I say this is because of changes in the Industry. With so many web developers out of work, most are sitting at home on unemployment learning new things, and the more you can put on your resume the better.

Just remember, when it comes down to you vs someone else, you want to have as much ammo as you can to beat them. Web developers are getting better and more skilled every day, competition is getting tougher, and wages are getting lower.

Simply put, you have to chase the shiny new thing because that's what people are asking for.

However I wouldn't spend so much time on it that your other work suffers. If you start devoting too much time away from your bread and butter job, it will suffer. If you take too much time away from your family, your home life will suffer. And if you focus so much on programming that you start slipping away from what's going in Graphic Design, you're killing your bread and butter skill.

So my advice is to pursue new skills as it's the only way to set you apart from many of the other people competing for your job. But do it at your own pace, and don't wear yourself out doing it. You've already got a job, so you can relax a bit and not have to over-exert yourself just to work. Keep it in perspective and start a few small learning projects for fun. Don't push yourself too hard, but keep your options open.

As a front-end developer jQuery and similar skills are almost becoming a default for the new applicants I've seen. It is programming, but it ties in with front-end stuff so I would suggest ramping up on it. The good thing is, with a basic foundation in javascript most of those libraries are really easy to work with. Once you're past that initial barrier of learning javascript the rest comes really fast.

Good luck with your endeavors, and great question!

Answer 8

I've actually seen this quite a bit in my career. People who realized they were good with css, designs, layout etc.. but just couldn't get excited about writing a for loop, or elegant data access layer etc...

I'm all for it. Do what you're good at it, and what you like to do.

I completely suck at design, css, layout etc... and only in the rare occurrence (no budget, no one else to do it) will I let myself actually write css. I know I should know it better, but I just suck at it and let it be known that I suck at it, and that we should bring in a CSS/Designer to write the HTML and CSS before handing it off to me to write it up.

As I pointed out in a previous post months ago.

Designers make it look great. Developers make it work.