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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

#51

Post by FLUX-YOU »

Silhouette wrote: post #16
grabcocque wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody wants to understand how CSS works. Sometimes we have to, but it's rarely by choice.

I respectfully disagree. I'd much prefer to understand the real technologies that run the web -- HTML, CSS, HTTP, and so on -- and then use tools and build abstractions on top when it's useful. Starting with some specific framework or tool set inevitably limits what you can achieve. Surely the recent emphasis on frameworks over fundamentals has been a major contributor to the Web full of bland, practically identical…

>Surely the recent emphasis on frameworks over fundamentals has been a major contributor to the Web full of bland, practically identical sites that we see today.

It used to be mostly plaintext and basic colors with no responsiveness, under construction gifs, basic images, and flashing text. Before that, just text. We're still learning as an industry. Web technology has not (and may never) settled like the hardware in your toolbox.

Those frameworks are geared for productivity, not possibility. Productivity is where the money is.

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

#52

Post by mixmastamyk »

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.

Agreed on the memorization of trivia questions.

I've encountered this clearfix problem and solved it independently perhaps five times over the last decade, but just had to look it up since I had no idea it was called "clearfix" ... someone's marketing term for it.

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

#53

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#54

Post by Silhouette »

saulrh wrote: post #28
Silhouette wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree. I'd much prefer to understand the real technologies that run the web -- HTML, CSS, HTTP, and so on -- and then use tools and build abstractions on top when it's useful. Starting with some specific framework or tool set inevitably limits what you can achieve. Surely the recent emphasis on frameworks over fundamentals has been a major contributor to the Web full of bland, practically identical…

A lot of these objections to abstraction sound like the objections to abstraction that we had back when we first invented interpreters and compilers. Are you sure that you want to be objecting to abstraction itself, rather than to our current, potentially inferior, implementations of abstractions?

I'm not objecting to abstractions at all. I'm just advocating understanding the fundamentals first.

I want to use abstractions and tools where they offer an additional benefit, but without being limited to whatever some predetermined choice of tools or abstractions can do.

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

#55

Post by throwaway420 »

Every developer has a specific set of tools/technologies/techniques/focuses that they really like and appreciate and that gives them a technical boner. For this guy it's HTML markup and accessibility stuff. For me it might be something like frontend performance and minimal design. For another dude it might be writing abstract and clever code that's as short as conceivably possible. For another guy it might be writing the most readable and documented code possible that eschews all cleverness. Another guy might be focused on writing 100% tests. Etc.

While every developer has things that they really like and appreciate, projecting this focus onto others and focusing on this one fetish point to the exclusion of everything else is detrimental to a project. Your job should be to build a team of smart developers who bring complementary skills to a project and who can learn things that are important to the project, not to build a clone army of yourself.

If the author was a comic book store owner interviewing prospective workers, the equivalent to this would be him rejecting hundreds of job applicants because they didn't know the thematic development and character interaction in issue #431 of Gunsmith Cats or some other random obscure anime or whatever.

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

#56

Post by jnbiche »

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.

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

#57

Post by err4nt »

diezge wrote: post #33
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.

I'd be worried they were asking about clearfix as opposed to flexbox.

I'd be worried about both! If you have to clear a float, you can do it even more cleanly in CSS by using a psuedo element.

The old trick was to set `overflow: hidden` on the element containing floated items so it would always expand to contain it - but then things like box-shadows get cut off by the containing element. To get around this, you can use an `:after` pseudo-element on the element that contains the float items. This comes after the last floated item and automatically clear the float without needing `overflow: hidden`.

Imagine markup like this:

    
      
      
    
    
    .section {
      float: left;
    }
    
    main:after {
      content: '';
      display: block;
      clear: both;
    }
The advantage of clearing a float this way over sticking `` or a `.clearfix` class in your HTML is that when doing responsive design, my method keeps the clear in your CSS (and possibly only one @media query). With a `` or class in your HTML you have to deal with that element at all widths - now do you have to specifically override your `.clearfix` class inside a @media query when doing responsive styles? How intuitive is that?

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

#58

Post by pkinchla »

daiwei wrote: post #10
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.

Totally agree. I see front end job descriptions asking for understanding of Java and .Net but no mentioning of JS, CSS or any HTML. There could be easily a miscommunication of misunderstanding what the company want. Not saying the job description used here is wrong, just an example of miscommunication.

I recently saw an Ad for a front end job requiring: "strong Java Scripts" skills.

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

#59

Post by jimminy »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #11

>Nearly no one could show off solid markup skills Because there's not a well known standard of what solid markup skills are. It's not really a surprise that people come to you without knowledge you claim as necessary when they had no idea it was necessary. The same is basically true for any position in any area of software.

There used to be a decent standard with (x)HTML 4.1, and the commonly followed process of designing with progressive-enhancement.

HTML 5 added the semantic tags, which are great, but there is less clear decisions for deciding section/article/div that the prior selection of just using div. There are other cases where it has introduced more confusion into the process where the semantics aren't straightforward to determine.

And progressive-enhancement is pretty much forgotten anymore. All the Javascript frameworks and pushing to work on the cutting edge of what's available, have forced a huge portion of effort to be spent on graceful-degradation instead. And working at the edge means that everyone is already working off any adopted standard, and just shimming everything to do what they want.

The front-end development out there is just kind of dumb at the moment in those regards.

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

#60

Post by nevir »

gioele wrote: post #48
dexwiz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I understand missing accessibility (either you have ARIA or you don't), but what does "solid markup skills" mean? The differences between many tags is just user agent stylesheet defaults. If I wanted to be extra crazy, I could build a website using alone. Or maybe I am just a bad developer.

> I could build a website using alone. Then my scraper that reads headlines on your website with `//(h1|h2|h3)` will not work. And I will not be able to read and linearize your tabular data. And plenty of other things. (Things you probably do not care about.) Oh, and you website will have no links (the `href` attribute of ` ` is not simulable via CSS).

The thing is, most developers aren't targeting your scraper. At most they're targeting Google's, which can handle all sorts of whacky and not very semantic markup - and glean a decent amount of semantic structure from it.
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