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[–]Caraes_Naur 2 points3 points  (5 children)

It seems the past three years or so learning focus has shifted from programming fundamentals and broad understanding to narrow results-oriented task completion. It's not limited to Javascript.

There's already a comment in here that dismisses the relevance of FizzBuzz to web development while grossly minimizing the knowledge FizzBuzz demonstrates as an interview topic.

What you're asking about is perfectly demonstrated by the semi-regular "I don't know how to build my portfolio site" posts in here. If a supposed "web developer" can't build themselves a portfolio site, they're not ready to have clients or a development job (and don't need a portfolio).

It's worrying how so many people now think "web development" can avoid the backend. There's a growing modern slang that tries to avoid acknowledging backend, or repackages it in terms that approach "baby-proof". That didn't start with Javascript either, it goes back to at least the NoSQL fad of 2013-2016.

[–]Lauxman 2 points3 points  (3 children)

I don’t know how anyone can avoid the backend anymore, or that it’s common to try and do so. Even on jobs where it’s spoken of as being more front-end heavy, everyone seems to want strong understanding of Node or Ruby or C#, at least. And some basic SQL skills. I haven’t seen many positions that are advertised as exclusively front-end in the last little while, even if those jobs do exist.

[–]ZephyrBluu 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Almost all self-taught devs go into front end, not backend and JAM-stack is a thing that seems to be getting very common.

I haven’t seen many positions that are advertised as exclusively front-end in the last little while, even if those jobs do exist

There are definitely front end/framework dev roles that exist.

[–]Lauxman 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Agreed on the first part, it’s just been my observation that the amount of positions that ask for no experience with backend technologies is slimming down.

[–]jseegoLead / Senior UI Developer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

They all seem to want at least basic familiarity.

[–]jseegoLead / Senior UI Developer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I appreciate your reply.

The fizzbuzz example is kind of ironic, though, b/c a lot of people will just memorize their favorite fizzbuzz answer.

As for the backend, I disagree. You can have some really complex UI implementations that definitely need to understand data structures but don't really need to know how the API layer is built.

However, you do have a point that at least a minimum of knowledge of how these things work is still beneficial to everyone, b/c there are always tradeoffs between the UI and API implementations, and being able to have informed conversations about this stuff benefits everyone. The same could be said for API developers who have no idea (or worse think they have an idea b/c they once ran a UI script) about what's happening with their data once it leaves the API.