That said, I'm not sure where the bar is, even in web. Writing Chrome extensions and apps? Javascript injection on mobile? Dart? Web Components? Ember? (ouch) Angular, or React.js? Or a certain company's stack like Closure? And don't forget security vulnerabilities and keeping up with OWASP checklists or UX improvements, prototyping in HTML. And then there's performance considerations, eg. what Ilya Grigorik writes about these days. And touch screens, mobile, responsive... Front-end has a lot of transferrable skills, but it's a complex beast too, often full of legacy code.

which is why the talent pool is larger and salaries lower.

No it's not. Because JavaScript the language is so bare-bones, you need to supplement language deficiencies with frameworks and libraries. So you go and pick from a menu of Backbone/Marionette, Angular, ExtJS, Ember, Kendo, jQuery or etc. - some of them work together, some of them don't. Most of those get you part of the way there, you may still need to pull in things like require.js to manage imports. Or, instead of raw JS, you go with TypedScript, or Dart, or CoffeeScript, or whatever, and then put a framework on top of those. You're still not done, because that gets you the JS part, usually you complement it with a CSS framework (like bootstrap) and a SASS framework. In the end, you have a hodgepodge of frameworks of libraries, that plug JS holes, and functionally look and feel different.

So no, it's not simply JavaScript everywhere.

Seriously, jQuery > all the other "low-level" libraries out there combined, and Angular > all the other frameworks out there combined, several times over.

If you want to interview practically anywhere, learn those three and you're solid.

Sure. But according to my in tray, last week it was Backbone, next week React is taking over the world, and by March we'll have standardised web components anyway.

It may be true that today Angular is much more popular than all the other frameworks, but if so, it will probably be a short-lived peak and IMHO says more about developers putting too much faith in frameworks generally than anything else.

Since when? It's perfectly possible to build web sites/apps, even large scale ones, using no framework at all. Pick a handy utility library, whether it's jQuery or Underscore/Lodash or whatever, and get coding.

I don't know where this idea that you somehow have to build web apps using some humungous framework came from, but I hope it relocates that rock and crawls back under it. In the history of programming, very few frameworks (as opposed to libraries) have stood the test of time.

I certainly agree with that. I'd expect anyone claiming significant front-end development skills to at least be familiar with ideas like MVC and data binding these days. I just wouldn't much care which specific tools they used to implement those things, and I wouldn't hold it against them if they'd considered their options and then chosen different designs and/or tools instead.

We are using jQuery/EmberJS/Bootstrap/Grunt. Everyone of the FEs agreed that experience in any JS MVC was acceptable. [2]

So while I agree that it's not JS, JS, JS but it's not quite as bad as what you're saying.

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[1]: We were having a problem getting front-end people so they had managers put 15 front-end engineers on the task full time for a month. Our mandate is 30 engineers in 30 days.

[2]: sdumas [at] yahoo-inc [dot] com if your looking!

I have never heard of a hiring war-room or lockdown of that type. Are you redesigning/improving the current process, or just interviewing people until you meet the quota?

But the big one is -- Google. When are they gonna pull the plug on AngulerJS, how broad is the contribution base outside of Google, and not using YUI was already a battle...

Unless, Dart, CoffeeScript, TypedScript etc.