You can get a back-end developer to do front-end. He might lack the experience to deal with some gotchas or browser compatibility but it's nothing that can't be solved with a simple Google search.
A front-end developer doing back-end, on the other hand, might not work as well.
In my experience they often fail to come up with anything remotely modular on their own, write maintainable code, understand the design concepts of more "advanced" frameworks like Angular or doing anything different than copy-pasting some jQuery snippet they found on yahoo answers.
It's not that JavaScript forces you to write spaghetti code, it's just that until very recently it was mostly written by clueless morons that didn't know any better.
How can you write your front-end in something like Reagent if most of your staff get micro-strokes when being asked to type {{ }} instead of <%= %> in your new template system or go la la la can't hear you when you mention the merits of CSS preprocessors?
Fortunately this is all changing as the result of front-end these days getting more "mentally stimulating" thus capturing the interest of back-end developers (the ones that more often than not happen to have degrees).
You can get a back-end developer to do front-end. He might lack the experience to deal with some gotchas or browser compatibility but it's nothing that can't be solved with a simple Google search.
A front-end developer doing back-end, on the other hand, might not work as well.
In my experience they often fail to come up with anything remotely modular on their own, write maintainable code, understand the design concepts of more "advanced" frameworks like Angular or doing anything different than copy-pasting some jQuery snippet they found on yahoo answers.
It's not that JavaScript forces you to write spaghetti code, it's just that until very recently it was mostly written by clueless morons that didn't know any better.
How can you write your front-end in something like Reagent if most of your staff get micro-strokes when being asked to type {{ }} instead of <%= %> in your new template system or go la la la can't hear you when you mention the merits of CSS preprocessors?
Fortunately this is all changing as the result of front-end these days getting more "mentally stimulating" thus capturing the interest of back-end developers (the ones that more often than not happen to have degrees).
disclaimer: anecdotal evidence etc