Get Out of My Silo! Be and Fe Developers Have Never Been More Distant

I’ve been thinking about the problems we are having at work. Sure, having an agile team with 20+ members does not make sense.

That’s not the real issue at play here. Not even close. There is something else that needs to be thought about and fixed. I think you might be surprised about this.

It’s all about ATTITUDE

The Story

Nothing to do with Brandi Carlile, this is to do with the environment in which I work.

When talking about a simple API call between the front and the back end, we got the following response from a lead developer:

“I’m a backend developer. I don’t care what the front end does with the response”

What’s the problem?

In our development group, we aren’t exactly encumbered with geniuses. I’m writing this in a call where the FE is discussing the naming of sizes for one hour.

If you add a lack of collaboration, the team becomes difficult to work with. Things simply don’t get fixed as fast as they should be. Features don’t get delivered and customers are not happy.

I’m sure if I asked that particular developer they would ask me what my problem is

The Result: Poor User Experience

Not to give you too much information about where I work, but I can tell you this: 

Our user experience sucks.

This is due to our developers not working together. Our BE insists that the FE makes multiple calls to construct a single screen. 

Could they implement an interface? Effectively they say the same as above, who cares what FE does?

I just hope our mobile customers never have a poor data connection

Conclusion

When you don’t work together, your work sucks. I’m sorry to say it to an audience who invariably cares about things over people.

However, when you don’t care for people, your code will also suck. Truth