> Proven experience of infrastructure planning and working with development teams to enable high availability of services in-line with SLOs and error budgets
> Evangelist for infrastructure as code and working with immutable infrastructure and configuration tools such as Terraform to achieve end-to-end automation.
> Experience working with CI/CD solutions and gitops to enable automation of infrastructure at scale (pipeline design, testing and best practices using Jenkins/Concourse/GoCD/Gitlab)
> Programming and scripting to a production level including testing (Go/Python etc) Cloud Platforms (designing infrastructure deployment patterns within GCP and using managed services, such as big data tooling effectively)
> Logging systems (deployment of and scaling of logging solutions, both cloud native and self-hosted e.g. Stackdriver, Elastic)
I don't think any of this is "front end" to me.
Here is another one:
> JavaScript, Typescript, React + Hooks, Redux, Node.js, HTML5 and SASS/CSS
> Webpack, Babel, Jest, Cypress and React Testing Library
> UX/UI design
> Docker and Kubernetes
> CI/CD and modern DevOps tools
From this list, the only ones that are "front end" to me are JavaScript (for DOM only, no server-side), HTML, CSS/SASS. UX/UI design is not front end development to me, it is a separate field, albeit with some overlap like accessibility.
I really believe the traditional role of pure front end no longer exist.
When JavaScript became the everything language (thanks nodejs), the role of front end became more integrated with back-end due to the influx of back-end devs writing JS for server side. Now we see that most "front end" devs don't even write plain JavaScript, first it was TypeScript - a back-end language imo, and now we are seeing WASM as perhaps another nail in the coffin.
I remember reading an article on HN, proposing a "front of the front end" developer [0], which I think is pretty much symptomatic of the convoluted situation.
Before when i used to apply for jobs, i would get some kind of html/css test. Now when i apply i get a hacker-rank test to deal with some algorithms, and i have to choose from js,ts,python,c++ etc. I think it says it all.
[0] https://bradfrost.com/blog/post/front-of-the-front-end-and-back-of-the-front-end-web-development/
But I don’t think front end ever truly existed. If it did, it was composed of broadly and shallowly studied developers who transitioned to full stack and specialists who transitioned to UX.
In my experience almost everybody has been mortally terrified of the front end. In the past people had bizarre opinions of what they wish JavaScript should be and would spend the majority of their energy brutally bastardizing the language to look like something it wasn’t. This was very common of Java developers.
Even now most front end developers carry a petrifying fear of the DOM. This is why employment looks like what you describe. Do you need giant applications, 100000 line of code, and long build processes to write text to the screen? Most developers will tell you it’s the only way to do it.
I am a huge fan of primitive use of TypeScript. It does require Node to execute the compiler, but otherwise applies to the frontend no differently than the backend.
Even if you build a pure frontend app with no backend whatsoever, not a single api call, you still need some infrastructure.
So I understand when FE job ads require some devops.
That being said, I did google the first ad and it is in fact ridiculous to call that position FE. The second list from your post is much more sensible.
> Before when i used to apply for jobs, i would get some kind of html/css test. Now when i apply i get a hacker-rank test to deal with some algorithms, and i have to choose from js,ts,python,c++ etc. I think it says it all.
It says that you'll be writing business logic on the frontend, and you can't do that with just html/css.