You are already downvoted into oblivion and rightfully so, but I just wanted to add my perspective as a backend developer (and the one who did post-graduate level mathematical stuff at that) who now manages a team of back and front end developers and plays with front end development for toy projects. The sheer amount of complexity and required knowledge for front end development is simply baffling to me. These folks have to know such disparate technologies as CSS, HTML, Javascript as a bare minimum and it never stops there. Typescript, templating engines, CSS preprocessors, huge and continuously evolving javascript ecosystem, evented concurrency (please take me back to my threads and semaphores), asynchronous state management in complex UIs with non-trivial interdependencies... Compared to this stochastic calculus is a breeze.
Totally agree. Also: I'm strongly against calling people "Front-End Developer" or anything like that at all. Where does front-end start? Where does it end? What is full-stack, does it imply you can do embedded? I've seen many listings that count PHP as one of the front-end requirements. This is just a term that should make the HR's job easier, and it does that badly.
We web devs actually have pretty solid definitions for "front-end," "back-end," and "full-stack." The back end deals with work on the server done after an incoming HTTP request comes in and involves preparing the HTTP response, including preparing the outgoing data for the templating layer if applicable (eg, when doing web page responses rather than JSON, XML, or binary responses). The front end deals with building templates such that that data becomes a standard web page, using CSS to style that page, and using JavaScript to implement client-side interactivity. A full-stack developer will be constantly switching between work from both sides of this divide rather than primarily focusing on one or the other.
If a job listing for a front-end developer is expecting applicants to know PHP beyond a "writing templates" level, it's either a poorly-written job listing or its creator has unrealistic expectations of its applicants - sadly, neither case is very uncommon in this industry.
At any rate, someone calling themselves a full-stack developer isn't implying they can do embedded, as that sort of stuff is pretty far afield of web development.
>The sheer amount of complexity and required knowledge for front end development is simply baffling to me
99% of it is self-inflicted though. You didn't need react/redux/sagas/uber popular framework 7.5 to do your job, but you and your coworkers thought "This is the cool new toy that facebook made!!!! Let's use it!!!" When 90% of web sites are reinventing a wheel made in 1994, there's no reason to actually do most of this junk
