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80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills

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Re: 80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills

#111

Post by lojack »

diezge wrote: post #98
diezge wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'd be worried about both! If you have to clear a float..." Why? I haven't needed to use floats at all since moving to flexbox.

lojack: "...but flexbox isn't always an option." When isn't it? If you're developing for old (now unsupported) versions of Internet Explorer I'm not sure they'd be bothered about being turned down (unless they knew about that when applying). Just because something was done some way once doesn't make it right, and putting emphasis on 'clearing float' questions would show your company use old, bad practices.

I wouldn't dismiss a candidate for not knowing how a clearfix works. What's important is they understand positioning and layout and how things tend to fit together. I'd reasonably be able to extract this information from them. Asking about clearfixes is one of many ways I'd go about picking their brain.

What I would dismiss them for, however, is the cocky attitude that they never need to bother learning any "old, bad practices." I'd dismiss them for thinking they are "above" working for a company that supports technology that was released just 4 years ago. Further, I'd dismiss them for the attitude that their solution solves all the problems without considering potential drawbacks. These are all huge red flags that show they may technically be knowledgable, but are very difficult to work with. Not someone I want on my team.

Re: 80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills

#112

Post by collyw »

acbabis wrote: post #85

While I agree that the writer's interviewing (or lack thereof) focused too much specifics, I still have to agree with the conclusion in the title (Good HTML/CSS/A11y skills are hard to find). The majority of candidates I interview struggle to explain the difference between `.a.b` and `.a .b`. Kind of hard to write maintainable CSS without that knowledge.

Where can a back end dev learn that stuff? Any good tutorials, as that is the sort of thing that always confuses me when I need to do some front end.

Re: 80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills

#113

Post by lkrubner »

mediocrejoker wrote: post #40
lkrubner wrote: post #14

The contrarian argument is that this signifies an important truth, that HTML never worked the way it was suppose to. In the same way that we might argue that a misunderstood product is the fault of the designer, not the user, we could argue that developers moving away from HTML is the fault of HTML, not the developers. This has been discussed many times, both here on Hacker News as well as elsewhere. To recap that ar…

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by a "GUI for TCP/IP" yet it seems central to your argument. I didn't realize HTML was ever intended to be anything other than structured information.

You have never seen HTML used to build something that a human might look at? What are you looking at right now? Aren't you looking at a web page? Aren't you human? Aren't you using your eyes to see what I've written? Unless you "View Source" on every page you visit, you are looking at the GUI, not the structured information.

If you think HTML can be used to send structured information, I would urge to read the essay that Mark Pilgrim wrote in 2004. I posted the link before.

Also, please consider all the many arguments that Sam Ruby has made against HTML-as-structured-data. From 2005 forward, there were many people who wanted HTML5 to be an extension of XHTML, but as Sam Ruby kept asking "Why should we call something XML if it is clearly not XML?" Over the years, in his role as co-Chair of the W3C working group, he kept making the point that "draconian error checking" is part of the XML spec, and it can not be reconciled to people's actual use of the Web. That is why HTML5 relaxed all the rules regarding validation and structure.

This is Sam Ruby in 2009:

"So, while I doubt that I will ever understand why there are people who insist on calling their pages they produce with the intention of being processed as HTML by the name “XHTML”, I can’t deny that there clearly is something that such people want. (By way of comparison, I am quite happy to say that this page is served as XHTML to browsers that support such, and as HTML to browsers that don’t). From my experience, this is tricky stuff, and not something that should be recommended lightly.)"

http://intertwingly.net/blog/2009/07/19/Humpty-Dumpty

Re: 80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills

#114

Post by JeremyMorgan »

morgante wrote: post #49
daleharvey wrote: post #5

At 80 people it might start being the time to question whether its really everyone else thats unskilled or your approach to evaluation is wrong. Asking a pop quiz of arbitrary tools / techniques that you happen to have remember really isn't a good way to evaluate if someone is a good developer. I am a good developer and I only just remember what clearfix is, I most certainly couldnt explain how it works.

It doesn't even sound like he interviewed the candidates at all. > Although I only had the chance to review their personal websites or github profiles and this might of course not be a full show-off of their knowledge, it assured my lately developed opinion on web developers. Apparently because people's personal projects weren't developed with accessibility in mind he concluded that developers don't know HTML/CSS.

I know great, not just good but GREAT developers who don't even have a GitHub. Yes, it's awesome when someone has one, but if someone doesn't have something on their blog or GitHub does that mean they don't know said subject? Nope. I'm questioning the methods used here.

Re: 80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills

#115

Post by kldavis4 »

Fuxy wrote: post #103
morgante wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't even sound like he interviewed the candidates at all. > Although I only had the chance to review their personal websites or github profiles and this might of course not be a full show-off of their knowledge, it assured my lately developed opinion on web developers. Apparently because people's personal projects weren't developed with accessibility in mind he concluded that developers don't know HTML/CSS.

Personal projects are a bit questionable as a skill test. I've been planning to do a personal site for a long time and wishing i could contribute on github more but most of the time the only contribution on github ends up to be bug fixes to libraries I use at work and I still haven't gotten anywhere with my personal website. Most of my best code will never be seen by any interviewer since it's done at work. Now if an…

Agreed. And on top of that, any personal projects I do actually find time to work on are typically pretty rushed (due to the lack of time) and are not going to be the best examples of my work product.

Typically I am just trying to write something quick and dirty to accomplish some task and want to share it in case somebody else might benefit. I'd love to make time to go back and polish things, but rarely do I have the time.

Re: 80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills

#116

Post by diezge »

lojack wrote: post #111
diezge wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lojack: "...but flexbox isn't always an option." When isn't it? If you're developing for old (now unsupported) versions of Internet Explorer I'm not sure they'd be bothered about being turned down (unless they knew about that when applying). Just because something was done some way once doesn't make it right, and putting emphasis on 'clearing float' questions would show your company use old, bad practices.

I wouldn't dismiss a candidate for not knowing how a clearfix works. What's important is they understand positioning and layout and how things tend to fit together. I'd reasonably be able to extract this information from them. Asking about clearfixes is one of many ways I'd go about picking their brain. What I would dismiss them for, however, is the cocky attitude that they never need to bother learning any "old, bad…

"...is the cocky attitude that they never need to bother learning any "old, bad practices." - so before learning ES6 everyone should learn how to use inline onclick events, alerting to debug etc otherwise they're "cocky"?

"..technology that was released just 4 years ago" - if you haven't been keeping up with the news on IE10 then... yeah

"I'd dismiss them for the attitude that their solution solves all the problems without considering potential drawbacks." - no one said there weren't any drawbacks, just when compared with old bad-practice hacks.

"but are very difficult to work with. Not someone I want on my team." - it sounds like the kind of people who're using react would be sad about that.

This post is evidently about junior developers, just because something is old/established doesn't make it right or that it shouldn't be questioned, because there's usually a better way.

Re: 80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills

#117

Post by acbabis »

collyw wrote: post #112
acbabis wrote: post #85

While I agree that the writer's interviewing (or lack thereof) focused too much specifics, I still have to agree with the conclusion in the title (Good HTML/CSS/A11y skills are hard to find). The majority of candidates I interview struggle to explain the difference between `.a.b` and `.a .b`. Kind of hard to write maintainable CSS without that knowledge.

Where can a back end dev learn that stuff? Any good tutorials, as that is the sort of thing that always confuses me when I need to do some front end.

I highly recommend this article: http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/the-30-css-selectors-you-...

Re: 80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills

#119

Post by z3t4 »

HTML takes like five minutes to learn. CSS is a lot harder, but give someone a few hours and they will also master CSS, or at least be able to Google what they are looking for.

JavaScript is a beast though. But if you use only the good parts and stay away from the quirks, someone should be able to code JavaScript within a few days.

What you should look for instead: Do they like learning new stuff? Are they humble and prestige-less? Are they intelligent and can think in abstract?

Re: 80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills

#120

Post by steveax »

cobaltblue wrote: post #96
jnbiche wrote: post #56

If you use proper semantic HTML, ARIA attributes are rarely needed. It's a good idea to validate nonetheless, but there's no point in writing: Sign in or Heading I can think of only a handful of aria attributes that would be helpful if you use proper HTML, such as `search`, maybe `toolbar` and a few others. But it's good to validate the markup regardless, to be sure.

Besides, all the ARIA stuff isn't free. It only benefits screen readers and bots that aren't Google's. The rejection from lack of accessibility is as strange as rejection from lack of functionality in IE 8 or less (which has perhaps 2-4x as much market share as that of all screen readers). For any website or webapp you should know your market and make the call whether you need to spend time upfront, burn the time now…

Posts like this give me the sads. Equating disabled users with a browser that has been EOLed? Wow, just wow. Also aside from being the right thing to do, depending on who you are and where you are, it may be the law...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_the_B....

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