The most difficult position to hire for in tech right now is not engineering. It isn’t design. It is the hybrid position: the UX developer. Or the UX designer. Or the implementation developer. Or the CSS engineer.
This is how difficult it is, I have no idea what the “official” title of this position is. We seem to go back and forth every few weeks on what to call it. But, this role has become incredibly crucial to how we and most web companies operate.
Historically the responsibility for this position has fallen to engineering, or maybe design, depending upon how your team ran things. And it was the worst work. Cutting HTML, building terrible CSS. But today process and standards have fallen into place to make this role a legitimate one that people should build a career in.
Understanding how to optimize pages rendering, reduce CSS selector lookups, organizing stylesheets and markup files. This is just the start. Finding someone that can communicate between design and engineering is a challenge and the people I’ve found to naturally fit into this role excel at this. All of this before we ever start to talk about accessibility, browser compatibility, standards compliance, and responsive design.
However, there is barely anyone out there making a career in this role. Perhaps because it has been traditionally looked down upon. Or perhaps because engineering and design get the glory. The UX developer might think of one’s self as the red-headed-stepchild.
We’ve taken a lot of efforts to bring the same quality we have in engineering and design here to our HTML & CSS. We’ve adopted BEM, SMACSS, and we’re constantly looking to improve our process and the tools we use. Have other companies found similar issues with this growing field? I’d like to hear from some people.
(btw we’re hiring)
