How is this different from any build engineer? For some reason we generally accept that client development isn’t trivial except when it’s a web client, then it somehow must always be trivial despite it being the platform that must deal with things like application payload optimizations and work on every device. Meanwhile look how busy the rabbit hole of Xcode config on a complex app can keep an engineer for a single iOS app, and we seem to just accept it because it’s not web, and web = bad.

So, we make fun of a company that is serious enough about their web client to have a fulltime build engineer while we lament how little thought and care seems to be put into so many web clients in the wild. Maybe it turns out that clients aren’t always trivial and some specialization / division of labor is what it takes to make a good product.

It wasn’t long ago that you could see HNers snicker about fulltime “front-end developers”. I mean, isn’t it just HTML and CSS? How hard could it be? Isn’t the server API the only hard part of building a rich client??

What does he spend his days doing? I wrote a configuration file years ago and I still use it for multiple projects. I only had to update it when upgrading between major versions of webpack.

Pretty sure it was a joke.

Absolutely not a joke.

This may not be a popular opinion, but if you need to dedicate a single FTE to your webpack configuration, something sounds amiss. Alternatively, if that's your engineers only skill (building webpack configs), that also sounds quite suspect.

In most projects, the webpack configs are not edited often, maybe unless you're upgrading a new major version of Webpack itself.

They're not edited often because they're hard to edit. Many times webpack issues just get deferred or ignored because no one has the time to investigate them.

Some teams have build engineers.