Comment by aalleavitch

I work for an ecommerce company that’s just small enough that as a front end dev I wear a really big stack of hats. I regularly have to reach across .net MVC, React components, jquery, fairly complex scss and JavaScript written to what standards were 6 or 7 years ago in order to implement new features. On top of that, I regularly fill in UX and design work when a designer isn’t available, and I run the company’s entire A/B testing process, and even find myself working with AWS configuration and the build process occasionally. That said, I love it; getting to participate in so much of the process allows me to really get a feel for the entire structure of the site as a whole, and I feel like experience in one area often informs learning in others and helps me communicate with specialists from many different areas. I could see it being a bit overwhelming coming foremost from a design background, but in my experience you do not need a degree to do this work (Mine are in Biology and Psychology). It just requires you to put in the time to research, and I personally think it’s time well spent (and a good boss will account for the fact that you may be learning things on the fly in setting project deadlines). Getting into the nitty-gritty of JavaScript and really understanding how it works and modern best practices will save you so many headaches later. I will say sometimes I feel pretty amateurish when it comes to the design aspect, because it relies so heavily on cultivating good design intuition, but even then I appreciate those opportunities to flex a different mental muscle.