The deskilling of web dev is harming us all

> Framework skills are perishable, but are easily just as complicated as the foundation layers of the web platform and it takes just as much – if not more – effort to keep them up to date.

That's so true. For my own projects I try to not use any framework at all (or sometimes still use Backbone, which is entirely deprecated but simple, and that I know well enough).

But of course, as an employee many times you don't have a choice. I was recently part of an Angular team (Angular 2). That was one of my most unpleasant experiences. Angular seems to revel in complexity for complexity's sake. And it's often not needed at all. In that case it was used for displaying information that lives server side and is constantly updated there (live inventory). Why would they need a big client for that?

There’s more to life than web dev. Backends for instance.

> There's so much work an opportunities.

Many of them suck though. I get hired as a troubleshooter usually: that makes the most and it’s nice, get to see many companies etc. I work with people who are hired for frontend, backend etc; a month or so in, they will be asked things like ‘so devops, is that something you can do?’ Etc. And that is if it’s not in the actual job offer; ‘frontend expert wanted with 4000 years experience in everything’. I usually leave after 3-6 months as I ask a lot of money, but I have been asked to advice and help on Windows upgrades, printer emergencies and more.

As a backend guy I uhh.. have long been of the opinion that web dev was always on the slippery slope of deskilling.

I remember working on a project where I was lone backend guy doing data storage/retrieval/aggregation/caching/entitelement/etc all behind a discoverable API that fed the UI everything it needed in a handful of calls.

Meanwhile the web dev guy took 6 weeks of iteration to create a date selector that wasn't awful.

Felt like they were too busy getting stuck gluing together frameworks they didn't understand and thus couldn't integrate well, and not simply writing a little code.

When he finally got it working, it was still awful. You had to select start date, start time, end date, end time.. and if you didn't proceed in the prescribed order the other selector boxes would reset and go wonky, lol.

A honest question. Could someone tell why is CSS getting more and more complex (other than Google and Co. want to protect their browser's market share and hold control of it)?