Web developer is not ideal. That is more of a people issue than it is a technology issue.
Whatever our collective gripes about JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, we all know how to use them. We know how to handle cross-browser compatibility and different screen sizes. What we need to do a better job at -- and I think this is the root of the problem you're describing -- is pushing back on businesses wanting to ship features too quickly.
We've all been at places where no one values good work on the client. The C-levels want to get things out the door as quickly as possible. They complain that our work has bugs and we tell them "Well that's what you get for telling me I had 3 days."
Because of this heat, front-end engineers rarely engineer their software. As you put it, they hack it together on top of libraries that have been hacked together by others. The solution is to take the time required to do things correctly. That means testing. That means not shipping features so we have time to refactor and upgrade frameworks. That means paying attention to performance and developing tools for debugging errors in production. If we want web development to get better, these things can't be afterthoughts. They must be considered before we say something is "done" and ship it to production.
Whatever our collective gripes about JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, we all know how to use them. We know how to handle cross-browser compatibility and different screen sizes. What we need to do a better job at -- and I think this is the root of the problem you're describing -- is pushing back on businesses wanting to ship features too quickly.
We've all been at places where no one values good work on the client. The C-levels want to get things out the door as quickly as possible. They complain that our work has bugs and we tell them "Well that's what you get for telling me I had 3 days."
Because of this heat, front-end engineers rarely engineer their software. As you put it, they hack it together on top of libraries that have been hacked together by others. The solution is to take the time required to do things correctly. That means testing. That means not shipping features so we have time to refactor and upgrade frameworks. That means paying attention to performance and developing tools for debugging errors in production. If we want web development to get better, these things can't be afterthoughts. They must be considered before we say something is "done" and ship it to production.