When many devs think of CSS they think of Peter Griffin trying to open window blinds. But for others CSS is more like putting their hand in the pain b

Why we're bad at CSS

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Style Pass

2023-05-25 06:30:06

When many devs think of CSS they think of Peter Griffin trying to open window blinds. But for others CSS is more like putting their hand in the pain box from Dune while some product manager has a gom jabbar to their neck, daring them to pull their hand out.

We're bad at teaching CSS. While there are a ton of great CSS practitioners out there sharing their knowledge (Stephanie Eckles, Kevin Powell, and Adam Argyle, to name a few), a lot of people learn HTML and CSS in college or bootcamps from people who are perhaps not as knowledgeable, use outdated techniques or gloss over the basics in favor of frameworks like Bootstrap or Tailwind. As a result, you end up with a lot of folks who don't have a deep knowledge of HTML and CSS, which are the basic building blocks of the web.

We're bad at hiring for CSS. Just about every job listing for a full stack or frontend engineer lists HTML, CSS and JavaScript proficiency as a prerequisite, but when they interview candidates, they're rarely testing for anything other than JavaScript skills. If companies end up hiring people with CSS skills, it's usually by accident. And if you don't have people with those skills you can't vet other people for those skills and the problem perpetuates itself.