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Hire HTML and CSS People

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Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#21

Post by legitster »

notpushkin wrote: post #16
Epskampie wrote: post #4

I know CSS quite well, as I've been working with it over 15 years. I've been surprised that new programmers hardly know it at all, and heavily lean on component libraries or css frameworks. Can see why though, css has become very large and complex, and it's only getting worse. The upside is that my simple fixes sometimes seem like a superpower to others.

> css has become very large and complex Respectfully disagree. I think CSS is simpler than ever, and it’s only getting more streamlined and powerful. E.g. what used to be a complex blob of floats is now a simple grid layout.

Hear hear. The tools are also so much easier.

Every browser comes with a built-in inspector and console tool. HTML + CSS is the lowest bar to entry of any skill.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#22

Post by FrustratedMonky »

axelerator wrote: post #11
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #3

"Every problem at every company I’ve ever worked at eventually boils down to “please dear god can we just hire people who know how to write HTML and CSS.”" Isn't HTML and CSS a base line, every programmer knows this? "This UX is awful? " But that doesn't make them good UX designers.

There are bunch of good UX principles baked into HTML and CSS. Plus to become good at HTML and CSS you will be exposed to a lot of UX talk as well. So one could argue it's really hard to get really good at HTML and CSS and not care about UX at all. But yes, a fool with a tool is still a fool - if that's the point you're trying to make.

Not directly making that point.

Just that a lot of programmers aren't necessarily known for their design aesthetic.

So you could 'not be a fool', and be very good at HTML/CSS, and yet not really understand or care about color, flow, layout.

But, to your point, surely they will absorb something in the process. But it is far from a given.

Isn't this the entire argument between Apple-Microsoft, Jobs-Gates?

Gates isn't a fool, neither are MS programmers, but they aren't known for good 'ux designs'

There are a lot more technology experts than good Design experts.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#23

Post by legitster »

solardev wrote: post #8

This has nothing to do with HTML or CSS vs any other language of the web. It should be "Prioritize frontend usability and design." For that you need good UX/UI people, who may or may not know HTML or CSS. It doesn't matter. Any competent frontend dev can copy a good Figma, but not every HTML/CSS/Tailwind/JS dev can make a pretty, usable, accessible website. If you think about your frontend primarily in terms of how "…

> Any competent frontend dev can copy a good Figma

I think that's part of the problem. If UX people don't know code and code people don't know UX, neither has the ability to validate each other's work.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#24

Post by pier25 »

Epskampie wrote: post #4

I know CSS quite well, as I've been working with it over 15 years. I've been surprised that new programmers hardly know it at all, and heavily lean on component libraries or css frameworks. Can see why though, css has become very large and complex, and it's only getting worse. The upside is that my simple fixes sometimes seem like a superpower to others.

> I've been surprised that new programmers hardly know it at all

Not saying TW doesn't have some merits but probably the biggest reason for its adoption is people avoiding to learn CSS.

Reminds me of Mongo over a decade ago. There was a huge influx of devs getting into backend with Node who didn't want to learn SQL. So they went with Mongo because it was easier to get started. And for a couple of years now there's been a huge shift back into SQL with Postgres and SQLite.

I'm pretty sure we'll see the same with CSS in a couple of years. Heck, it might be already happening.

And native CSS is becoming so good that it will be impossible to ignore. With nesting and variables it made already SCSS unnecessary for most projects.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#25

Post by karaterobot »

notpushkin wrote: post #16
Epskampie wrote: post #4

I know CSS quite well, as I've been working with it over 15 years. I've been surprised that new programmers hardly know it at all, and heavily lean on component libraries or css frameworks. Can see why though, css has become very large and complex, and it's only getting worse. The upside is that my simple fixes sometimes seem like a superpower to others.

> css has become very large and complex Respectfully disagree. I think CSS is simpler than ever, and it’s only getting more streamlined and powerful. E.g. what used to be a complex blob of floats is now a simple grid layout.

It's getting more powerful than ever, and it's easier to do things that used to be hard (vertically centering, etc.), but it's also got a lot more capabilities that have a learning curve (custom properties, color functions, container queries, etc.).

I've been writing CSS since 1997, and I remember having to use invalid characters to fork CSS in the days of IE 6, and all the old school hacks involving floats, full-height content, etc. CSS in that era was hard, but it was hard in the sense of "there's stuff we just can't do in the browser, so let's design around that". Nowadays, it's hard in a different way, which is "oh, I guess there's an entire new hoard of CSS capabilities I've literally never heard of before, and I need to spend some time wrapping my brain around it, so I can add it to the massive and ever-growing pile of CSS things I need to know".

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#26

Post by windows2020 »

wmil wrote: post #19

I think the issue is that HTML and CSS are awful braindead work that are a career killer. If you hire developers who know HTML and CSS please rotate in some more interesting work for them. Also be careful not to elevate the design team above people doing the HTML / CSS. Too often the design people go back and forth with a higher up until an "approved final design" that makes no sense gets thrown in the laps of the de…

Writing consistent, concise and elegant HTML and CSS takes practice. Mastery of a language and discovery of its patterns requires thought.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#27

Post by hk1337 »

ponector wrote: post #5

I don't agree. Hire people who cares about results, actual product. Nowadays people cares only about closed stories. Performance? Usability? Usual response is: Not my job, don't care!

I agree, building a good company culture will dictate a lot with people's feelings about doing their job and also hiring people that share the same feelings.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#28

Post by cuddlyogre »

Epskampie wrote: post #4

I know CSS quite well, as I've been working with it over 15 years. I've been surprised that new programmers hardly know it at all, and heavily lean on component libraries or css frameworks. Can see why though, css has become very large and complex, and it's only getting worse. The upside is that my simple fixes sometimes seem like a superpower to others.

I don't understand what people mean when they say things like CSS has gotten more complex. It's not like anyone is realistically expected to commit the entire spec to memory.

Documentation is plentiful when a person needs to use an unfamiliar feature, so it's not like it is even necessary to keep everything you use at the top of your mind. And just like anything else, if you use is often, you'll naturally learn it.

Plus, things like flex and grid have made having to remember a ton of old hacks unnecessary, so it has actually gotten markedly easier to use.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#29

Post by al_borland »

legitster wrote: post #18

I'm a crusty old HTML and CSS person. The problem is that most of the skills are in the marketing department - not engineering. I've noticed lately a huge "React-ification" in the past few years where the UI on apps are both getting overly designed, but also more confusing and worse. Bigger buttons, bigger text, overuse of whitespace, bad pagination and breadcrumbs, etc. There are a lot of best practices that were "s…

> I asked them if they were using a CSS framework at all and the response was "we are using React, we don't need one".

This hurt my brain.

I recently saw a video where a guy was claiming that people who had gone through a web development bootcamp (using React and the whole nine), where unable to make a basic hello world HTML file.

When people don’t know the basics, it’s no wonder everything is over complicated. They were never taught how it could be simple.

Re: Hire HTML and CSS People

#30

Post by adregan »

legitster wrote: post #18

I'm a crusty old HTML and CSS person. The problem is that most of the skills are in the marketing department - not engineering. I've noticed lately a huge "React-ification" in the past few years where the UI on apps are both getting overly designed, but also more confusing and worse. Bigger buttons, bigger text, overuse of whitespace, bad pagination and breadcrumbs, etc. There are a lot of best practices that were "s…

As an additional example: when I was first cutting my teeth on the web as an amateur in high school, I remember reading about the ills of "mystery meat" navigation and I can recall the hard fought battle to excise it from UIs. Now 20+ years later, it's back in force.

Perhaps we expected that the lessons we collectively learned about good design would be self-evident to the next generation or that there would be a knowledge transfer, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

The web (and most software really) seems to go through such extreme cycles of destruction and rebirth for the sake of marketing—and resume building, if we are being honest—that it's sometimes hard to find a throughline from the designs of yesterday to today.

I think about it all the time when there is an OS update (mac) that moves the state of design off into a direction that is in conflict with the design ethos of the past. I realize then that the designers and engineers likely never even used a classic OS let alone read the work of Jef Raskin or the Macintosh HIG.

It's really weird that the industry casually sloughs off lessons of the past. I don't think we should be restricted to only designing as we did in the past, but I do think that it's beneficial to understand where we came from.

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