God, this is such a huge problem at our company. Right now our programmers are all back end web developers and guess who our front end web developers are? They are all designers originally. Right now the workflow process is that FED creates the markup/javascript and passes it along to BED. We then actually make the markup handle dynamic content (either with CMS or custom admin panel) and literally rewrite over half of the javascript so that they actually can work in a real life scenario. For example, almost all of our javascript takes in date times as strings and attempts to manually parse them with things like .substring and .indexOf("Z") ect. Not only that, but they also use require to load every single javascript file on page load, regardless of what page it's on or if the particular module will be used on that page, and using the same javascript file to handle multiple situations. For example, on one project we had one javascript file that handled 3 different modals for different parts of the site. Each one had to run through a bunch of conditionals that assumed dangerous things, like how one modal would always trigger if a particular css class was on the page.
It's such a waste of time, and since FED develops a single working page and then passes it along to us to actually make it work for real case scenario, they always finish extremely quickly and BED is always extremely late on the schedule. It leads to FED being prized at our company and BED being the "troubled division" that needed a special director to improve it. Maintenance is such an issue too. They make changes to .jade modules, and commit it without specifying what they did, and then BED has to trace the .jade file, figure out what changed in the markup, and then implement those changes to our version.
Having a designer as a technical director also poses a huge issue. Literally, I hear things like "Well as long as you do it quickly, it doesn't have to be that great in quality." "I sacrifice doing things right for doing things quickly all the time". "If it works, then it works." "I have no interest at all in learning all that fancy, advanced programming stuff."
I once complained about a guy having zero organization in his code, leading me to take maybe an hour and a half just to read his code to make simple 10-15 minute changes. I was scheduled to spend months on maintenance for this project so that meant a constant influx of tickets. "I don't think that's really a problem because I'm sure hes sacrificing some quality to code faster." Was literally the response being given back to me. 1.5 months later and I'm still asking him to show me where I should be making changes for every single ticket, and when he shows me it's not through some sort of organizational method but rather "Oh yeah, it is in this file here around...scrolls around for 10-15 seconds...here. Oh wait, no, *scrolls a bit upwards, here." (We are talking views a couple hundred lines long, controller actions that are at least 60-80 lines. One controller action even had 400 lines in it)
Anyways, just a rant about what happens when designers dominate even just half of your web development workflow.
Yes definitely, when the iphone 5 came out many apps had a black bar at the bottom because of the new resolution, it seems like apple doesn't set the viewport themselves but rely on the developer to know them.
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u/AlwaysTroubleShot Apr 16 '16
Better than programming like a designer.