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.
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.
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'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.
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'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.
