Roger Johannson writes on the lamest excuses for not being a web professional. One of the things that surprised me going from the US East Coast telecommunications world to the US West Coast dot-com world was how much of a rarity front-end developers are. Middleware is a well traveled and understood problem domain. The front-end has several new technologies and has not commoditised as the middleware and back-end has. For instance, front-end MVC frameworks are a rarity; they are as common as dirt in middleware.
What the company I am now with calls the "presentation layer" actually delves into what I would call Middleware, going a bit deeper than the controllers. Which means what they call a front-end developer has to be aware of technologies from Java, HTML, Javascript to CSS.
CSS developers are the real rarity and in a development process that is driven by the User Experience group they are the most essential. It has been interesting to see what I thought was important get turned on its head by a different industry.
