[ksikka]

I was so on-board at the beginning - yes, html and css skills are undervalued.

And then the essay tried to generalize the lack of respect for HTML/CSS specialists as an example of lack of respect for specialists compared to full-stack devs. This is where I think the essay took a wrong turn.

The technical community has tremendous respect for backend or math specialists. Now more than ever, ML and data science is cool. High performance is cool. Security and cryptography are cool. Etc.

But HTML and CSS? There is a general attitude that they're "easy" and javascript is "harder". But writing good HTML and CSS should be considered one of the highest art forms. Good HTML and CSS makes the end user go "wow, this is nice and clean" and makes the javascript developer go "wow, this is nice and clean". Achieving both of these is so fricking hard!

[watwut]

It is odd attitude. Css is harder then javascript. I mean, javascript is quite easy to learn, that is its biggest advantage.

[AstralStorm]

Only true as of language. If you're doing websites you get to learn idiosyncrasies of browsers, DOM manipulation, asynchronous design, performance considerations, etc. That on top of how HTML and CSS is laid out and converted to DOM. Which is as hard if not harder.

Of course it is easy to produce toy projects.

[ksikka]

Javascript is not easy to learn. Many language quirks, and doing anything fancy with asynchronous code will require an understanding of closures, functional programming, and perhaps promises.