by Serguey Shinder
For about twelve years I told people I was not a front-end person. I said it often, and I said it early in conversations, usually with a small self-deprecating shrug that made it sound like honesty about my limits.
It worked perfectly. People stopped asking. Work routed around me. When a project had an interface component, somebody else picked it up without anyone having to have a conversation about why, and I got to keep doing the things I was comfortable being seen doing.
The claim came from 2004. A project where I had fought a layout for two weeks and lost, in an era where that fight was genuinely unpleasant, and where I had been given no help and had been faintly humiliated in a review. From that I concluded something about myself, and then I never checked it again. Not once in twelve years. The evidence base never grew and the conclusion never weakened.
What broke it was logistics, not courage. A colleague left in the middle of something, the deadline did not move, and there was nobody else. I spent about three weeks being visibly mediocre in front of people whose opinion I cared about, which was as bad as I had expected. Then I stopped being mediocre, which I had not expected at all. By the end of the quarter I was not good, but I was perfectly ordinary, and ordinary was all the work had ever required.
The thing I find hard to sit with is not that I was wrong. It is how comfortable the wrongness was. A sentence like that does two jobs. It describes you, and it protects you, and the protection is so convenient that you stop wanting to test the description. I had a fence, and I had built it out of a fact about 2004, and I kept maintaining it long after the fact had expired.
It also quietly capped other things. Not understanding the front end meant not being able to reason properly about half the systems I worked on, so I held opinions about the back end that were more confident than they had any right to be, because I could not see the other side of the boundary.
I try to do something about it now, in a small way. Once a year I take one of my "I'm not a…" sentences, and I ask when I last tested it. If the answer is more than a few years, I spend a month on it, cheaply and privately, with no announcement.
Most of them turn out to be old. A few turn out to be true, and there is a real relief in that, because a limit you have actually checked is a completely different thing from one you have been repeating.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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