In our group we have always recruited “developers”.  Is this wrong?  Maybe in the past it wasn’t, but today?  Could be.  Here is what we are currently expecting all of our developers to be experts in:

ASP.NET, JQuery, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, LINQ, NUnit, Castle ActiveRecord, NHibernate, HQL, T-SQL, PL/SQL, Data Modeling, Stored Procedures, AJAX, Log4Net, Usability, and more.

Is it time to further specialize developers?  You bet.  Offshore, onshore, it doesn’t matter.  How can we realistically expect our entire development team to be “experts” in all the technology above and still deliver projects successfully?  I, for one, feel more comfortable writing “back-end” code such as business logic, SQL, etc. and I’m sure there are others like me out there.  I am nowhere near as strong a developer in client-side development (Javascript, AJAX, JQuery, etc.) and making pages look exactly like the prototype that was handed to me.

So, here is what I propose going forward.  We begin to evaluate our developer pools in a different ways than we have in the past.  In the past, we’ve interviewed candidates to find out which one could answer the most amount of questions in all the technologies listed above.  The one that could hold her own in the most areas won and was awarded a long-term contract where she had to keep her skills up in all these areas and more.  Over the past several years this hasn’t worked as well as it could so we are about to change it.  We are now going to reevaluate our talent and find out strengths, weaknesses, and areas of interest.  (Yes, you must find out where developers are interested too because these are the areas where they will probably be most successful).  We are going to separate them as shown below:

Front-end Developers:
ASP.NET, AJAX, JQuery, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Usability

Back-end Developers:
LINQ, NUnit, Castle ActiveRecord, NHibernate, HQL, T-SQL, PL/SQL, Data Modeling, Stored Procedures, Log4Net

Common Skills All Developers Must Have:
C#, XML

The list above is not absolute as there will always be a mixture of skill sets.  However, the goal will be to use the general categories to help staff projects.

Now, on our upcoming projects, we are going to pair the developers and divide the work based on thier skill sets.  In each project we will do our best to split the skill sets 50/50 (or close to it) as needed.  This way, the developers that really shine in front-end development can spend most of their time building the web pages, working on the AJAX and working on the user experience.  The back-end developers can spend their time where they are the strongest in wiring up the database and building the business logic.