Get the latest tech news

The deskilling of web dev is harming us all

Even before the web developer job market became as dire as it is today, I was regularly seeing developers burn out and leave the industry. Some left for good; some only temporarily.

Companies should have CSS specialists on their teams who take care of the complexity of providing stylesheets, with class and attribute hooks, that work well with the project’s architecture and design. Nodes in the DOM can affect the rendering of both their ancestors and descendants and it’s very easy to run into a situation where, for example, position: sticky doesn’t work and the utility class model makes figuring out the issue much harder. Unlike a collaboration with an actual expert, Tailwind demands its own expertise and quickly begins to require an understanding of how the underlying CSS stack works, undermining much of it’s own purpose.

Get the Android app