It's also pretty damaging for the health of small businesses when they need to pay thousands to webdevs.
We don't consciously think about every heartbeat or work out how all the light in the spectrum creates vision. Some things are best left solved. Paying hundreds of thousands people in an economy to be CSS masters is just wasteful. It's solved. Move on.
Tech experts have been quick to automate away other people's professions. The boot's now on the other foot.
The call for CSS specialization strikes me as seriously misguided (even before agentic coding became a thing). Yes, web development is complex and you can’t know everything, but it is possible to learn what you need as you go and generally build up a strong high-level sense of what is possible and what approaches are reasonable for quality. But web development is not rocket science. Someone with CSS skills but not JS or probably some backend sensibilities as well is just not very useful. Being a software engineer inherently means comfort with change, it’s definitely a field that comes with a lot of challenge and potential for burnout if you don’t take care of yourself, but atomization of roles is definitely not the answer.
I'd always been amazed over the years by how many people didn't even attempt CSS. They looked at it like an after thought. Reminds me of a favorite Archer quote: "I thought we skipped that step.", "Skipped a step... in bomb defusal...?"
> Yes, web development is complex and you can’t know everything
Maybe you can't "master" every branch of web dev, but it's entirely possible to be competent at building out the whole stack if you focus on learning just one stack
Really enjoyed this article, I like your writing style.
Re: your pro-specialist argument -
"Specialists cost more because you either need to pay more to hire them, or you need to pay for the time it takes for somebody to become a specialist. But the productivity improvements should more than outweigh the cost."
Here lies the problem. I'm not sure the productivity improvements do outweigh the cost according to the metrics businesses track and care about. the benefit to customer experience or the structural integrity of the software outweighs the cost, but that's not something business leaders are incentivized to care about in a meaningful way.
maybe there's a cultural failure - where if we consider a 'generation' of devs to be in cohorts of 10years. they have failed to pass knowledge down. hence why the wheel keeps getting reinvented.
every industry grows & refines itself by knowledge & skill getting passed down. software is the one anomaly. & right now with LLMs they're tryna kill juniors.
Truth be told, these days one can't really hope to succeed in life doing any jobs that involve delivering stuff that goes through the screen. Time to move on.
It's also pretty damaging for the health of small businesses when they need to pay thousands to webdevs.
We don't consciously think about every heartbeat or work out how all the light in the spectrum creates vision. Some things are best left solved. Paying hundreds of thousands people in an economy to be CSS masters is just wasteful. It's solved. Move on.
Tech experts have been quick to automate away other people's professions. The boot's now on the other foot.
On the topic of web dev: I have a Full HD 27" monitor (1993.25 sq cm area), and the title of this article takes up 1197 sq cm...
You are not kidding, in mobile I had to scroll one and a half screen to get past the title.
The call for CSS specialization strikes me as seriously misguided (even before agentic coding became a thing). Yes, web development is complex and you can’t know everything, but it is possible to learn what you need as you go and generally build up a strong high-level sense of what is possible and what approaches are reasonable for quality. But web development is not rocket science. Someone with CSS skills but not JS or probably some backend sensibilities as well is just not very useful. Being a software engineer inherently means comfort with change, it’s definitely a field that comes with a lot of challenge and potential for burnout if you don’t take care of yourself, but atomization of roles is definitely not the answer.
I'd always been amazed over the years by how many people didn't even attempt CSS. They looked at it like an after thought. Reminds me of a favorite Archer quote: "I thought we skipped that step.", "Skipped a step... in bomb defusal...?"
> Yes, web development is complex and you can’t know everything
Maybe you can't "master" every branch of web dev, but it's entirely possible to be competent at building out the whole stack if you focus on learning just one stack
Really enjoyed this article, I like your writing style.
Re: your pro-specialist argument -
"Specialists cost more because you either need to pay more to hire them, or you need to pay for the time it takes for somebody to become a specialist. But the productivity improvements should more than outweigh the cost."
Here lies the problem. I'm not sure the productivity improvements do outweigh the cost according to the metrics businesses track and care about. the benefit to customer experience or the structural integrity of the software outweighs the cost, but that's not something business leaders are incentivized to care about in a meaningful way.
the market for artisan software is just too small
so what's the cause ?
maybe there's a cultural failure - where if we consider a 'generation' of devs to be in cohorts of 10years. they have failed to pass knowledge down. hence why the wheel keeps getting reinvented.
every industry grows & refines itself by knowledge & skill getting passed down. software is the one anomaly. & right now with LLMs they're tryna kill juniors.
which boils down to 'culture'
Full title: The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it's damaging our health – this is why burnout happens
Truth be told, these days one can't really hope to succeed in life doing any jobs that involve delivering stuff that goes through the screen. Time to move on.
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