If I had been more definitive, I would risk making the same mistakes that the people who inspired this article were making. That is, to rigidly define what a front-end engineer is in terms of completely arbitrary constraints. I wanted to provide a set of commonalities that I have found through my experiences, but not to explicitly say "this is what a front-end engineer has to be." A good front-end engineer can come from ANYWHERE and I state that by saying that there are clearly going to be exceptions to whatever I write.