I interview a lot of candidates for my company. More generally, dedicated UI developers are becoming harder to find in my experience. More often, I see “full st

I interview a lot of candidates for my company. More generally, dedicated UI developers are becoming harder to find in my experience. More often, I see “full stack” devs who turn out to be back-end devs with some exposure to UI development, mostly with big, popular frameworks like Angular, which simultaneously hide and increase complexity, adding lots of layers of abstraction. Much less do I see strong CSS knowledge and experience. I think much of this must come from the proliferation of UI libraries like Bootstrap and Foundation, where most of the design is done for you (even the responsive bits) so mostly all you have to do is copy and fill in boilerplate code. Don’t get me wrong, this is great and it saves a ton of time, allowing most projects to get away with not even having a single dedicated UI/UX resource, but it also means there are fewer and fewer UI generalist out there who actually know what’s really happening in the browser. Back in the day before all these fancy frameworks, I had a lot of time to luxuriously tinker with CSS and core Javascript, and I even developed a few of my own, admittedly horrible by modern standards, custom UI “frameworks”. These days that would be unheard of. This is s very long-winded way of saying I generally agree with the article’s sentiments. CSS is no longer a core skill because it doesn’t really need to be, which is both good and bad.