Our company hired a guy who literally just wrote CSS, and it was an awesome hire. He had instinct for how the layout engine will do best, how to make really cl

Our company hired a guy who literally just wrote CSS, and it was an awesome hire. He had instinct for how the layout engine will do best, how to make really clean and reusable structures, how to get smooth animations running. This instinct was totally infectious. It had an impact on our culture around CSS (taking it seriously and doing it right the first time) in the same way that having someone who really knows logging, or concurrency, or db transactions, can really make an impact if they're there near the start. Along the way lots of people assumed he knew JS, which if anything probably enforces the article's point. But before us he was just a smart guy whose side projects involved reskinning CMS sites and making cool CSS animations. After a year of avoiding it he did start writing JS, and being honest, our app is pretty unique for needing that much love at that level — A year of time just doing structural, design, and layout changes is totally not warranted, almost anywhere. However, I think there _is_, often, a false hierarchy that tends to build up among developers, where somehow, all server work >>> all JS programming >>> all design thought. This cultural "legitimacy" ranking, at best, leads to people letting horribly incoherent styling pass code review without a second thought. At worst it means high turnover in the people at the "bottom" of that totem pole who feel disrespected. As someone who spends 80% of his time on the server side I think this is an important bias to be aware of.