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Finding Good Client Web Developers is Hard

Finding Good Client Web Developers is Hard

Today I had a meeting at a customer. Finding Client Web Developers is HardOne of the things that we talked about was the difficulty in finding good web developers.
To be more accurate, the difficulty in finding good client web developers!
Since I have lots of experience in interviewing candidates, I really understand that guy's problem. He published his company’s job requirements and seek for an experienced client web developer and all the candidates that he interviewed so far didn’t know javascript very well…
Since the customer and I work in ASP.NET environment then the majority of developers in this world are more server side oriented than client side. I hear a lot of sentences like “javascript is hard!”, “why use javascript if you can use server controls?” and more.

Mastering javascript is a must in web development! and being a web developer in .Net environment doesn’t excuse you from learning javascript.
If you are a web developer I expect you to know javascript and also HTML and CSS very well.

These are the building blocks of web development!

Like in other craftsmanship, if you don’t know the basics how do you expect to become a master?

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Posted: Jan 19 2011, 03:20 PM by Gil Fink | with 10 comment(s) |
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Comments

eladkatz said:

That may have been the case 3 years ago... Today with jQuery it is so much easier.. There's no excuse for not being fluent in Client-side development.

My take on the subject is rather simple. Asp.net programming poses a very low entrance barrier, and therefore you can find many bad programmers. It's very easy to drag controls and act as if you're not working on top of HTTP pipeline. That's the greatness of classic ASP.Net, and that is its downfall.

# January 19, 2011 10:46 PM

Meir Winston said:

Don't be too hard on your interviewees

# January 20, 2011 1:24 AM

Adi Inbar said:

dear gil.

your expectation from a developer was always in the sky.

i agree with you of the necessity of knowing javascript html etc.

but defenetly there is a place for infrastructure developers server side developers and so on.in a utopian world u are write but there is an experties.

in my devision there is a client side team and server side team and combine the sources all together.it is not that javascript is hard more than anything else but when u put your effort to build your experties in afield become an expert as u can in the field you are feeling comfortable.learn all the basics achive an solid good background and master in the field that u fill good in

# January 20, 2011 6:07 AM

Gil Fink said:

@eladkatz,

I don't agree that this situation was 3 years ago. I'm still facing it today even with frameworks like jQuery and as I wrote there are others who face the same issue like yesterday customer. Finding good client side web developers who master javascript is hard even today.  

About ASP.Net, We think alike. It imposes a very low entrance barrier which can mislead developers to think that HTTP pipeline and the web stateless behavior doesn't exists.  

# January 20, 2011 8:21 AM

Gil Fink said:

@Meir,

I'm not being hard on candidates but as I wrote I expect that a web developer will know the basics. Do you really expect me to hire for a position of senior client web developer a person who doesn't know what is addEventListener method (or attachEvent if we are talking about IE versions below version 9)or what is the Document Object Model?

# January 20, 2011 8:30 AM

Gil Fink said:

@Adi Inbar,

You know me well to understand that I don't expect the sky.

About dividing the expertises to server side and client side teams, this is a privilege of big organizations and companies. In small companies, such as yesterday customer, you are expected to be more multi-disciplinary.  

# January 20, 2011 8:39 AM

Ran Wahle said:

From your comments I get that "Sky" is a relative term :)

An Asp.Net developer has to be a WEB developer first. That means that

he\she has to give up treating Web-Forms as WinForms, master javascript,

W3C standards etc.

Although JQuery has made things a lot easier however there's still a lot of legacies out there... Moreover, developers who have "treats Web-Forms as WinForms" are not likely to learn JQuery, this is an attitude issue first.

# January 20, 2011 11:39 AM

adi inbar said:

sorry for the misunderstood.the basics i more than agree with u. and the fields u mention are truely basics. u were my master for long time and i learn from u a lot . but become a master, i dont think any developer ,which is not a client side developer per exalance, can be. master for me is taking a field and devide it to parts and learn every aspect of it and only than u achieve your goal.

# January 20, 2011 2:32 PM

Moshe Kaplan said:

Hi Gil,

I think that your basic mistake is the role description. If you are looking for a client developer (HTML, Javascript and even PSD), you should not look for a C# developer. C# developer is rarely a web client developer.

Keep Performing,

Moshe Kaplan

# January 22, 2011 11:07 PM

Gil Fink said:

@Moshe,

I disagree with your assumption that the role description isn't well formed. Since the customer is working in ASP.Net environment he might expect that the developer he is looking for will also know ASP.Net. I agree that if you look for client developer the server side (C#, ASP.Net etc) shouldn't be the main factor for disqualifying candidates. The interview itself will focus on client technologies and not server.

Best Regards,

Gil

# January 23, 2011 9:14 AM