I’m gonna put here a timid «I call bs on this».<p>First of all: HTML+CSS is indeed pretty complex. When you care for A11y, Responsiveness, Performance, Maintenability, complexity rises as a cartesian product.<p>But if you introduce interactions, the complexities rise by orders of magnitude.<p>To keep up with those complexities, you need to have a strong engineering background in concurrent/event-driven programming. Because that’s what a UI is.<p>So a HTML+CSS developer is all good till they need to add a dropdown, or any interactive component. Then you either know how to manage that complexity, or you’re gonna introduce technical dept to the project (or just pass responsibility).<p>In reality, what I saw, is that developers focused on front-end usually can perfectly learn on the spot what they need to keep their HTML+CSS accessible or responsive. When they have a knowledge gap is usually for past disinterest.<p>On the other hand, HTML+CSS developers usually have a hard limit when talking about interaction.<p>So, when I’m searching for developers, I look for the skill super-set, because I can make a HTML+CSS dev out of a FE dev, not the opposite.
It's insane to me that CSS and web layout et. al. has become so complex that it's being described as <i>engineering</i>.<p>This seems to further be a confusion between <i>design</i> -- that is, the blank-slate, unfettered artistic approach to a user interface -- and <i>design</i> as in the architecture of the software that makes it possible for the art to function in a usable way.<p>Those are two quite different skillsets and I can't imagine there are very many developers who are very strong at both.
Tech recruiter here. From all software engineering profiles, frontend is indeed the hardest to match because the variety of skills is so big. On the one end you have JQuery people who are stuck in 2002, on the other hand you have people like Dan Abramov.
Can't agree more with this. Nowadays, it's hard to tell what anyone wants from a front end developer any more, and there have definitely been a few jobs I've interviewed for where they wanted one type while the description was seemingly tailored to the other.<p>I'd also this is why Gutenberg isn't a great idea for WordPress, and why it feels the software's going the wrong direction. It's trying to aim at the Airbnb/Netflix/Facebook/Google crowd writing SPAs in React and what not, whereas its actual audience are the traditional web developers, agencies and deisgners using standard HTML, CSS and a bit of JavaScript and PHP.<p>Also a few interesting articles linked there that need posting here individually...
It seems like traditional craftspeople (e.g. woodworking) worked directly with the medium they designed for. AFAIK industrial designers are heavily involved in creating/production their products.<p>As a developer turned designer I can’t understand how anyone can design for the web and not know how to write HTML and CSS.<p>There’s always going to be grey area but I don’t think you should need an CS/engineering degree to build a UI.
Surely someone with HTML+CSS skills and a strong focus on layout, user experience and accessibility counts more as a "designer" than a "developer/engineer"? Something akin to the old term "web designer", who might have dabbled in Javascript but worked mostly with HTML+CSS.<p>In contrast, the terms "developer" and "engineer" definitely have a stronger implication of programming being a major element of the job. Though nowadays on React-using sites, designers might have to work with JSX and JS directly, causing an even greater crossover of the roles.
It seems to me that everyone is trying to normalize terminology and job titles instead of normalizing skills and disciplines. Why not read a book or follow a tutorial? Anyone can learn CSS from zero to expert in a week. Instead we spend time giving ourselves a new title that is just the right mix of accurate and ego-stroking.
I am wondering whether this is also a problem in game development or not. In game development to create a game often you need an even more broad skillset in your organization than in web frontend developemnt. Can frontend development learn from game development when defining the roles?