Quote:
Originally Posted by suzzer99
And then someone else does it in a day and your trust is blown. Don't get me wrong, we do push back all the time when we think something makes no sense from a UI POV - or will complete muck up site maintainability - but it's not the easiest thing. You have to pick your battles.
It's a tough issue. My own experience dealing with non-tech managers is that they don't really know anything at all, and they don't have a vision at all. The problem isn't them: it's the people with a enough knowledge to be extremely dangerous but have no clue that they are dangerous, and those people are either sitting ducks and / or highly disruptive to the process. This is the type that has a "vision" and thinks everything should be easy. The issue I see is that while some element of what they want may be easy, they generally default to asking the people that find said things very difficult. This is simple commerce really: if they can go to Google and see a solution written by Paul Irish that looks easy and obvious, they aren't going to understand why the company they are speaking to can't, or won't, be able to do an HTML5 or CSS3 implementation of every little desire, and they aren't going to want to pay for something that appears simple, but they also don't know how to inspect a page source and see that the company is incapable of doing anything but Dreamweaver table layouts. Despite their so-called expertise, they don't want to pay for anyone else's expertise. Remember that it's easy to slap a few pieces of code together and most of it is probably drag-and-drop anyways?
Internally, companies are upended by the stress of building a new website. Everyone has their vision and feelings get hurt across the board. This is why many dev houses I spoke with was deeply concerned about having more than one point of contact. The stress of dealing with so many opinions is too much to handle, and that opinion shouldn't be held over the heads of the dev houses.
So, push back from a developer is very difficult to swallow internally because that decision was already made through a lot of arguments and tears. It was for this reasoning that I dropped out of any web development interaction at the company I used to work for and let the whole thing sit on the shoulders of one person.
To get back to the topic of 90k+ / year, I imagine that someone who is excellent at interacting with all levels of non- and semi- technical management in companies, speaking to all levels of developers within their dev house, and able do this smoothly without upending the whole process is someone who would be worth 90k pretty quick.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gaming_mouse
it's not really strange. CSS is an abomination of a language. getting very good and comfortable with it basically amounts to a number of tasks: Understanding the language itself, as it was designed in theory; understanding how to use that language to do actual layout/design tasks in the real world (ie, vertical centering, etc); understanding cross-browser idiosyncrasies; understanding mobile responsive design issues; and finally (not a requirement) understanding a framework like SASS or LESS.
doing all the above requires not only good programming skills, but an extremely high tolerance for nitty bull****, memorization of one-off exceptions and ad-hoc hackery. that is to say: you need a smart person who enjoys doing boring work (or rather: who doesn't find this type of work boring). those people do exist, but i think they are rare, and it requires a specific personality type.
The nice thing about CSS is that with nothing more than a browser and notepad, you can create a layout or some silly
images without really knowing anything. The alternatives are scary: Java + OpenGL w/ a smattering of vector calculations?
I don't find the concept of easily creating visual stuff boring, though I agree that CSS is not the greatest language, but I think the movement to OOCSS certainly helps the language be more manageable. Sass sure as hell helps a ton as well, though the CSS it puts out doesn't really reflect what you fed it. You can attach external files to Sass files, but it will spit out a huge CSS cluster-****, so while the design of the SCSS files is excellent, the stuff you'd see with ctr-u isn't.
When you say "good programming skills," are you saying someone that is very good at designing easy to maintain file systems or something else entirely? I would have thought that nittery bs comes along with any language.