That’s right, but that’s a good thing. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried having a conversation with a web developer, but if you have you’ll get where I’m coming from when I say that.
Why am I not a web developer?
Is it because I’ve never had any formal education in web development, is it because I don’t know a million different languages and frameworks, is it because I don’t see in code like the Matrix.
Nah, it’s because defining yourself as a web developer is just weak in my eyes. You might as well be telling me that you only care about a tiny sliver of the full spectrum of what your responsibilities are.
If I’m not a web developer, what am I?
I’m a problem solver. My job is to take a problem, something that’s either currently a manual process, something that’s not working very well or something that would help users out and automate, refine and optimise it.
That applies to BOTH frontend and backend development work!
To be good at doing that, I HAVE to understand the problem. It’s very important to step out of the shoes of a web developer and start seeing things from other points of view.
If you can think about a problem as if you were the user, the colleague or anybody else involved, you can start to understand why doing things a particular way might not be the best way of doing it.
You should have the aim of delivering something that after using it for a while the user can’t remember how they coped without it before!
Your typical developer is concerned only with the code, the measure of success is, does it work, yes or no?
That just isn’t good enough, the attitude needs to change and it needs to be something more like does it work yes or no, Ok, how can it work better?
If we can start to change how we work to be more empathetic to others around us, we can act as a bridge in between each area of a business, design, SEO, marketing, sales and so on. This is an INCREDIBLY powerful factor for a business, as you’ll no longer be solving problems for the web only, but problems for the business as a whole, allowing them to become a true omnichannel selling platform.
A simple analogy…
If modern-day business were a gourmet meal, you as the developer would be the chef. Each of the teams in the business would be head chefs, and the data would be the ingredients.
Your job would be to make the best meal possible with the ingredients you have, based on the recipes the head chefs have provided.
You can follow their instructions perfectly, but if you slop it out onto the plate and throw it at the customer, they probably won’t enjoy the meal very much.
You could decide to not put a few ingredients in because you didn’t have them and deliver the meal to the customer and they’ll eat it, but they probably won’t come back again.
Or you could go and get the things you are missing and put together a perfect meal, that you can happily present to the customer knowing they are going to absolutely love it and tell all their friends.
To summarise
Don’t be such a nerd. Take your head out of your backside and start thinking and acting like a human being.
