I think the industry has an attitude problem towards the front end stack. HTML and CSS is not what programmers do. Nobody takes the time to learn it, everybody neglects it, managers hand it over to their newest junior developer, project managers are happy as long as it looks shiny, bootcamps don’t teach it properly, curriculums don’t teach it properly. In the end we have a bunch of people that don’t know anything about the craft, that accept poor craftsmanship as an industry standard.
I had a conversation about this with my partner—who is a woodworker—this morning after reading this thread. I explained my perception of the status of front-end within our industry as such:
It’s as if woodworking and carpentry were synonymous. There are woodworkers that do cabinetry, but all of them learned carpentry. At most they took a single course on cabinetry, but that course probably used outdated methods, tools designed for carpentry, and the teacher them self has build a couple of chairs and a few tables in the past. Most of the people new to the field of cabinetry would come for bootcamps that last for maybe a month where they had to learn woodworking from scratch. Good furniture makers are only expected to be good at woodworking in general. Master carpenters are often expected to be able to finish—or at least manage—furniture projects at their job.
You can imagine the sloppy craftsmanship you would see in the furniture building industry if that were the case. And yet, as tech workers, here we are.
I had a conversation about this with my partner—who is a woodworker—this morning after reading this thread. I explained my perception of the status of front-end within our industry as such:
It’s as if woodworking and carpentry were synonymous. There are woodworkers that do cabinetry, but all of them learned carpentry. At most they took a single course on cabinetry, but that course probably used outdated methods, tools designed for carpentry, and the teacher them self has build a couple of chairs and a few tables in the past. Most of the people new to the field of cabinetry would come for bootcamps that last for maybe a month where they had to learn woodworking from scratch. Good furniture makers are only expected to be good at woodworking in general. Master carpenters are often expected to be able to finish—or at least manage—furniture projects at their job.
You can imagine the sloppy craftsmanship you would see in the furniture building industry if that were the case. And yet, as tech workers, here we are.