People: Front-End vs Back-End

A developer who never misses a deadline might be a good developer. He might reduce the quantity or quality of his work to the bare minimum to do so. Quite possibly, the management team values such choices in favor of the deadline more than an increased quality released after the deadline. On the long run, a pile of bare minimum solutions becomes unstable and completely ignores the wishes of the end user. This means that end users may be spending a significant part of their day being frustrated to work with an inefficient application.

In many cases, the management team makes it even worse by purchasing large software systems intended to improve business processes, resource planning and accounting. From management perspective, these products deliver results. On the other hand though, these kinds of products pay little attention to the end user in most cases. 

But there may be good news on the horizon: the latest trend is an increasing attention for usability and rich user interfaces on the internet. Sometimes this is at the cost of standardization, but the real front-end developer knows how to handle such issues properly.

Despite this trend, there remains a major part of the development community who consciously choose to ignore the end user perspective. They expect the end user to adjust to the application instead with intensive training instead of meeting their demands by optimizing usability.

Both kinds of developers can cooperate if they divide the tasks: one works on the user interface and the other implements the back end. The question is whether a poor front end programmer can make a good back end programmer. I have some doubts there. The complexity of the object models to create GUIs is outstanding training material to improve your object orientation skills.

The problem of creating rich clients became worse in the past few years, because the current generation of developers was raised making classic web applications. The majority of young developers has absolutely no experience developing real client side applications providing rich user interfaces by default.

There is good hope that the RIA trend will resolve this issue!