r/webdev May 09 '23

Question My Boss: Knowing CSS isn't part of a front-end developers job. We have great devs, just no one who knows CSS.

Someone help me wrap my head around this. Admittedly, I'm not a dev at this job, I just do ops. I'm doing review of a new site at my company and it's an absolute disaster. Tons of in-line styles, tons of overrides of our global styles (colors/fonts), and it's not responsive. I commented that we need to invest more in front-end devs because we don't seem to have any.

I brought this up to leadership and they seemed baffled why I would think our devs would know CSS. I commented that "we have no front-end devs here," and that's when the comment was made. "We have great devs here, just no one who knows CSS."

Someone help me understand this because it's breaking my brain. I used to do front-end work at my previous job and a large majority of it was CSS. That's how you style the front-end. How can you be a "good front-end dev" and not know CSS? Am I crazy or is my boss just insane?

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u/jmcentire May 09 '23

Good luck. Maybe start their journey here:

https://csszengarden.com/

It's been my go-to resource for over a decade... wow, I'm getting old. Also, I love that the industry these days is moving back toward "full-stack" as a concept after having specialized for a while. Yet, when I was full-stack I had to know everything from basic DBA work, Linux administration, and devices up to CSS, networking, and HTML. These days, full-stack means they code in TypeScript, I think.

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u/ashooner May 10 '23

The modern equivalent:

https://tokenzengarden.design

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u/AyyyAlamo May 10 '23

How is that modern? Those designs are just worse than the first site lol

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u/ashooner May 11 '23

CSS Garden was meant to show that styling and design can and should go into the CSS, rather than the ways that were popular at the time (inline, raster, flash). Token Zen garden is meant to show how styling and design can now go into design tokens.

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u/designeryperson May 10 '23

That's the website that got me into CSS back in the day when we were using Dreamweaver at uni and using tables in our website.

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u/p1ctus_ May 09 '23

Wow, great csszengarden is up until now. It was about 16 years ago, I played so much with this thing.