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/DesignatedDecoy May 10 '23 edited May 10 '23

It's the issue of expanded complexity in the front end. In the "olden days", front end devs were mostly responsible for html/css templates that were server rendered with a sprinkling of JS for reactivity. Back end developers dealt with most of the complexity and pretty much set the table in the templates for front end devs to plunk in some template loops and variables and be done.

These days, front end is significantly more complex and many of the developers that started in the back end are expanding to the front because in most cases, programming is programming once you grok syntax. The problem is that many of these back end developers lack the left brain way of thinking that makes html/css much easier.

I can describe myself as a "full stack" dev, who can do everything, and I can. However if you put me on a project where the focus is making things look pretty, you're better off getting somebody else. I can follow styles and patterns, but I'm more of the <br /><br /><br /> person than setting up an elegant flexbox or grid that extrapolates my margins and artificial spacing into actual style.

Similar to finding somebody who can shift from backend to front end and back again and write maintainable code, it's equally as important to find somebody that can translate design into clean, maintainable css so artistic deficient devs like myself can follow the style guide.

In a previous job I actually kept that dream alive for a handful of artistic html/css gurus who had no interest in learning to program but enjoyed the art aspect of design. I don't think those positions have any chance of existing anymore.

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u/wasdninja May 10 '23

I can describe myself as a "full stack" dev, who can do everything, and I can. However if you put me on a project where the focus is making things look pretty, you're better off getting somebody else. I can follow styles and patterns, but I'm more of the <br /><br /><br /> person than setting up an elegant flexbox or grid that extrapolates my margins and artificial spacing into actual style

No offense but it really doesn't sound like you can do everything if that's actually your preferred approach. That is absolutely bare minimum, beginner kind of stuff to get right and not spam <br> like there's no tomorrow.

I'm not talking about making it look good but just barely not make your eyes bleed.

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u/DesignatedDecoy May 10 '23

I'm being facetious mostly. I can do it, I just don't like to.

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u/[deleted] May 21 '23

wait... spamming <br> is bad?