UI Dev vs Other Dev Work

[Pip in a Poke]

I've recently be appraisng my future as a contractor vis a vis my technical skills, the market and what I want to be doing for the next few years.

I've reached the conclusion that all the stuff I always enjoyed doing, i.e. the pretty stuff, is becoming more marketable than what the de facto .Net "full stack" developer gets up to.

I'm guessing client side stuff is a lot more complex than it once was and not many people seem to do it very well.

They may know how to apply their patterns in the managed code world but most often the Javascript I see is a pile of unmanageable, bug ridden spaghetti. Similarly CSS.

I've got quite a few of these client side strings to my bow now & I find it's these that are getting the attention of agents over my c sharp, mvc, sql server etc.

Which is good news because (and this may be a coincidence) when I'm doing that kind of work I never find I'm in the micromanaged, battery-hen type environment where everything is fed to you in bite sized chunks. The work is also more challenging and more interesting & I'm quite happy to not have to do any more .Net ever again.

[LondonManc]

As you've figured out, you're better getting into an area of IT that's as much an art as a science; it's far more difficult to offshore successfully.

[radish2008]

It's only niche until people flood into it - most CSS and front end guys I've worked with are not classical devs in any case. There seems to always be a line between the dev and the guys that do the front end pages.
Personally I find CSS and JS, JQuery etc pretty tedious and am far happier middle to back end. You're right though - I've seen some hideous JS libs that take a while to clean up

[jmo21]

It certainly feels like they are more Javascripty jobs being advertised recently. React, Angular, Node etc

Trying to get a break between contracts to get some time to get to grips with one or more of them, as haven't been able to during a contract (yet!)