First of all: HTML+CSS is indeed pretty complex. When you care for A11y, Responsiveness, Performance, Maintenability, complexity rises as a cartesian product.
But if you introduce interactions, the complexities rise by orders of magnitude.
To keep up with those complexities, you need to have a strong engineering background in concurrent/event-driven programming. Because that’s what a UI is.
So a HTML+CSS developer is all good till they need to add a dropdown, or any interactive component. Then you either know how to manage that complexity, or you’re gonna introduce technical dept to the project (or just pass responsibility).
In reality, what I saw, is that developers focused on front-end usually can perfectly learn on the spot what they need to keep their HTML+CSS accessible or responsive. When they have a knowledge gap is usually for past disinterest.
On the other hand, HTML+CSS developers usually have a hard limit when talking about interaction.
So, when I’m searching for developers, I look for the skill super-set, because I can make a HTML+CSS dev out of a FE dev, not the opposite.
Having said that, maybe you're responding to one part of the article, and I'm responding to another, so we're talking past each other.
I think when you're going to hire someone you should try and screen for interest in the things you need them to do. That and screen for a proven ability to learn things quickly (cognitive ability). That or you take a calculated risk when hiring.
Totally quote on hiring.
I strongly disagree with your last line as well. Coming from, and knowing many of my colleagues that started as HTML+CSS dev, that went into jQuery -> Backbone -> SPA frameworks -> ES6. It's definitely possible, but it depends if the person (or candidate) has the passion and aptitude to pursue that path.
As I answered the other sibling comment: those developers already are UI/app devs in my classification.
It took me 5 years to realize that "bleeding edge" != "best practice".
It is just a static website for crying out loud.
But once I got around it, it gave me a score of 100 in performance and 80 in SEO just out of the box. Images are resized and inlined if need be; critical CSS is rendered first; the plugins added niceties like default anchor link in Github. And I could use React components to organize everything, which is a much more ergonomic way of doing reusable markup compared to server-side things like Rails partials.
I would've needed to spend weeks if I had to get here from scratch. Gatsby is bleeding edge and it does best practices - including performance better than most other static site generators. I think the web is only moving forward - there is cambrian explosion of new untested and often ill-thought ideas, but the good ones will survive in the long run.
Most small to medium sized projects don’t need MVC, build systems, preprocessors, docker, etc. It's just a collective fascination for shinny overly complex things.
I've never seen anybody pick it up that fast. Even the best students coming out of multi-month frontend bootcamps aren't at an expert level.
This seems to further be a confusion between design -- that is, the blank-slate, unfettered artistic approach to a user interface -- and design as in the architecture of the software that makes it possible for the art to function in a usable way.
Those are two quite different skillsets and I can't imagine there are very many developers who are very strong at both.
In contrast, the terms "developer" and "engineer" definitely have a stronger implication of programming being a major element of the job. Though nowadays on React-using sites, designers might have to work with JSX and JS directly, causing an even greater crossover of the roles.
I'd also this is why Gutenberg isn't a great idea for WordPress, and why it feels the software's going the wrong direction. It's trying to aim at the Airbnb/Netflix/Facebook/Google crowd writing SPAs in React and what not, whereas its actual audience are the traditional web developers, agencies and deisgners using standard HTML, CSS and a bit of JavaScript and PHP.
Also a few interesting articles linked there that need posting here individually...
As a developer turned designer I can’t understand how anyone can design for the web and not know how to write HTML and CSS.
There’s always going to be grey area but I don’t think you should need an CS/engineering degree to build a UI.
