I am a “Front-End Architect”….or um, I’m trying my best to be one.
Garrett Dimon wrote a great article about the emergence of the Front-End Architect, and more specifically, what skills you need to be one these days.Garrett lists 14 seperate skillsets he believes is important for someone in that role, from the obvious (XHTML, CSS & JS) to others you’d expect (design, usability) but surprises a bit with how important he thinks programming knowledge is. While I’m not sure I completely agree with his example of the front end guy telling the back end engineer how to do things, I do agree that a good understanding of at least what is possible is a huge requirement.
This is a job title I’d love to see start showing up in Monster, as I (and others I hope) are starting to get pretty tired of job requirements that require the front-end developer to be a graphic designer as well, or the graphic designer to have a full understanding of how to take their Photoshop mockups and actually create the standards based XHTML and CSS from their designs as well.
I’m also glad that this role encompases more than the basic building of a web page, because it finally gives a bit more credability to the role, as most of these skills are not skills that the “amateur” using Dreamweaver in WYSIWYG mode would have.