Comment by qingcharles
3 months ago
Andy Bell is absolute top tier when it comes to CSS + HTML, so when even the best are struggling you know it's starting to get hard out there.
3 months ago
Andy Bell is absolute top tier when it comes to CSS + HTML, so when even the best are struggling you know it's starting to get hard out there.
I don’t doubt it at all, but CSS and HTML are also about as commodity as it gets when it comes to development. I’ve never encountered a situation where a company is stuck for months on a difficult CSS problem and felt like we needed to call in a CSS expert, unlike most other specialty niches where top tier consulting services can provide a huge helpful push.
HTML + CSS is also one area where LLMs do surprisingly well. Maybe there’s a market for artisanal, hand-crafted, LLM-free CSS and HTML out there only from the finest experts in all the land, but it has to be small.
I think it's more likely that software training as an industry is dead.
I suspect young people are going to flee the industry in droves. Everyone knows corporations are doing everything in their power to replace entry level programmers with AI.
I'm afraid of what the future will look like 10+ years down the line after we've gutted humans from the workforce and replaced them with AI. Companies are going to be more faceless than they've ever been. Nobody will be accountable, you won't be able to talk to anyone with a pulse to figure out a problem (that's already hard enough). And we'll be living in a vibe coded nightmare governed by executives who were sold on the promise of a better bottom line due to nixing salaries/benefits/etc.
1 reply →
This isn't a bootcamp course. I don't think Andy's audience is one trying to convert an HTML course into a career wholesale. It's for students or even industry people who want a deeper understanding of the tech.
Not everyone values that, but anyone who will say "just use an LLM instead" was never his audience to begin with.
How do you measure „absolute top tier“ in CSS and HTML? Honest question. Can he create code for difficult-to-code designs? Can he solve technical problems few can solve in, say, CSS build pipelines or rendering performance issues in complex animations? I never had an HTML/CSS issue that couldn’t be addressed by just reading the MDN docs or Can I Use, so maybe I’ve missed some complexity along the way.
Look at his work? I had a look at the studio portfolio and it's damn solid.
If one asks you "Why do you consider Pablo Picasso's work to be outstanding", then "Look at his work?" is not a helpful answer. I've been asking about parent's way to judge the outstandingness of HTML/CSS work. Just writing "damn solid" websites isn't distinguishing.
2 replies →
Being absolute top tier at what has become a commodity skillset that can be done “good enough” by AI for pennies for 99.9999% of customers is not a good place to be…
When 99.99% of the customers have garbage as a website, 0.01% will grow much faster and topple the incumbents, nothing changed.
Hmm. This is hand made clothes and furniture vs factory mass production.
Nobody doubts the prior is better and some people make money doing it, but that market is a niche because most people prioritize price and 80/20 tradeoffs.
5 replies →
A lesson many developers have to learn is that code quality / purity of engineering is not a thing that really moves the needle for 90% of companies.
Having the most well tested backend and beautiful frontend that works across all browsers and devices and not just on the main 3 browsers your customers use isn't paying the bills.
3 replies →
Amazon has "garbage as a website" and they seem to be doing just fine.
> When 99.99% of the customers have garbage as a website
When you think 99.99% of company websites are garbage, it might be your rating scale that is broken.
This reminds me of all the people who rage at Amazon’s web design without realizing that it’s been obsessively optimized by armies of people for years to be exactly what converts well and works well for their customers.
2 replies →
Lots of successful companies have garbage as a website (successful in whatever sense, from Fortune 500 to neighbourhood stores).
1 reply →
Which describes a gigantic swath of the labor market.
Struggling because they're deliberately shooting themselves in the foot by not taking on the work their clients want them to take. If you don't listen to the market, eventually the market will let you fall by the way side.