What’s the difference between a “software engineer” and “Front-end developer”. For example, if someone is designing the code for Google, who is designing the look of the app?
Like take a popular app like Outlook. I understand that software engineers design the code and stuff, but who decides how it looks, where the reading pane goes and stuff like that.
I googled “Front end developer” and was getting a lot of info about WEB developers, but that isn’t the same right? Like are the same people who design the look of how Microsoft Paint (where the paint brush goes, where the scroll wheel goes, etc), are those the same people that design the menus for a video game?
Are all those people “front end developers”? Are they “designers”?
In: Technology
First off, none of these terms are an exact science. They are certainly not used consistently everywhere, so I’m just providing a decent rule-of-thumb from what I’ve seen in the industry. That being said:
Generally the term “front end developer” is used to contrast with “back end developer”, both of which write code for web applications. The key distinction being that the back end is run on a server somewhere, and the front end is the code run on an actual user’s computer (which, yes, does involved the visuals but also generally more than just that). Of note, “full stack developer” is used for developers who do both.
In the case of a program like MS paint, I would likely call that job a generic “application developer”, and there wouldn’t be any distinction between who does the visuals and who does the ‘rest’: they are usually coupled enough that there isn’t a lot of benefit of having distinct jobs handling each part.
As for UI/UX designer, these are the people who actually make the decision of what the application/web site looks like. They often aren’t coders at all, but rather designers who (to put *far* too simply) bring pretty pictures to the developers who then implement it as part of their design. Generally, they are also involved in user research and those kinds of things, to determine what is a good look for the product.
Edit: Oh, and “software engineer” is usually just a synonym for “software developer”, which is just about the most generic title you can have. In a web-oriented business it might be what they call their back-end developers, but as I said before there is no real specification so it could mean different things to different people. (Of note, you *can* be an accredited software engineer, meaning you’ve gone through similar governmental proceedings as architectural engineers or the like, but in most of the industry its really a useless title. Maybe some government jobs like NASA, or safety-critical software like airplanes, requires it, but for most private businesses software engineer == developer)
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