I dunno. On the one hand I hate “web dev” more than anyone. I think it has led to such an astronomical decline in software quality that if you described it to someone from the days when computers were 1000x slower, they straight up wouldn’t believe you.
That said… the article doesn’t really ring true to me. What he is saying about the complexity of each part of the stack (http, html/dom, css) is technically true, but that’s not really how it washes out in practice. This whole “CSS is a complex graphics engine!” “HTTP is a protocol you could write a whole dissertation about!” sounds like an argument being made by someone trying to make a rhetorical point about web. In practice for most of web dev you don’t need to understand the deep nuances of CSS or HTTP or whatever. Yes, there is a large breadth of material you have to learn but the depth you actually need in any one area is much less than the author is trying to imply.
And yes, web is trash, but for different reasons. In fact some of those reasons are the opposite of what the author is saying. He says that each part of the stack is so complex it should be a separate specialty. But the real problem is the very fact that things are so complex. Rather than accept that complexity and subdivide the field into different disciplines, we should get rid of all this unneeded complexity to begin with.
He does also point out that CSS Grid or html tables havent changed. The web still mostly works the same.
You are yet another perfect example of raw antagonism against the web, a body of hate. You are legion. But, if we look at the arguments here, look at where complexity dwells, the things that are hard and changing aren't the fundamentals, aren't the essentials. They are not so complex.
What is hard/changing is state management. What is hard/changing is handling state in client-server or other connected architectures. What is hard/changing is being smart about offloading work to threads. And it's not like anyone else has conquered this complexity. None of the other ecosystems are particularly far in advance. The complexity of these cases seems to be inherent, not accidental.
The reason for so much complexity is because we change & improve & progress. This makes some people very upset. People drastically over-ascribe the woes of the software development world to the web, when really it's just that the web is now the default place for making software & most companies would bungle up these concerns no matter what platform they were building atop.
> On the one hand I hate “web dev” more than anyone. I think it has led to such an astronomical decline in software quality that if you described it to someone from the days when computers were 1000x slower, they straight up wouldn’t believe you.
Nearly all of this, IMO, can be explained by a lack of passion.
I grew up on computers, starting in the 90s. I didn't have internet access until near the end of the decade, and it was slow dial-up. If you broke the family computer, you had to figure out not only how you had broken it, but how to fix it. When I found Linux (Gentoo, obviously, because it's way more fun to spend days tweaking CLFAGS than to use the software), I was also thrust into forum culture, which was rife with RTFM. You quickly learn either to search and read docs, and demonstrate a modicum of capability and effort, or you lose interest and do something else.
This is not the case now. Even before the advent of LLMs, it wasn't that hard to find the answer to most of your questions on SO. The rise of cloud computing means that you don't have to know how to run a computer, you just have to know how to talk to an API – and even then, only at a surface level. You can pretend that TCP doesn't exist, have no idea how disks magically appear on-demand (let alone what a filesystem is), etc. Databases, which used to be magical black boxes that you accessed via queries carefully written by wizened graybeards, are now magical black boxes that you abuse with horrifying schema and terrible queries. Worse, you don't even have to know their lingua franca, and can commit your crimes via an ORM, which probably sucks.
And for all of this abstraction, you are paid handsomely. The difficulty in landing your first job is tremendously high, sure, but the payoff is enormous. Once you're in, you'll find that the demands of most businesses is not to upskill, but to push features out faster. Grow the user base, beat others to market, and dazzle VCs. No one has time for doing things right, because that slows down velocity.
This is aided and abetted by Agile, specifically Scrum. Aside from maintaining the cottage industry of Agile consultancies, it's designed to turn software production into a factory, where no one person really needs to know how to do anything tremendously complex. Instead of insisting that people learn how to do difficult things, we spend hours per week breaking down tasks into bite-sized increments with absurd abstractions of time.
"Thought leaders" deserve a callout here as well for their contributions to this mess. Microservices are a great example. A potentially useful architecture in some circumstances has been turned into gospel that people buy into without question, and apply everywhere regardless of its utility or fit. If you're lucky, someone eventually notices that rendering a page seems to take a lot longer than it should, but more often than not this is met with a shrug, or at best blaming the DB and paying AWS for a larger instance. Multiple network calls that each have to traverse N layers of routing and queues is slower than calls within a single process? Color me surprised.
When you combine the allure of a high-paying job that has little barrier to entry with no business incentives to do things differently, you get what we have today.
That said… the article doesn’t really ring true to me. What he is saying about the complexity of each part of the stack (http, html/dom, css) is technically true, but that’s not really how it washes out in practice. This whole “CSS is a complex graphics engine!” “HTTP is a protocol you could write a whole dissertation about!” sounds like an argument being made by someone trying to make a rhetorical point about web. In practice for most of web dev you don’t need to understand the deep nuances of CSS or HTTP or whatever. Yes, there is a large breadth of material you have to learn but the depth you actually need in any one area is much less than the author is trying to imply.
And yes, web is trash, but for different reasons. In fact some of those reasons are the opposite of what the author is saying. He says that each part of the stack is so complex it should be a separate specialty. But the real problem is the very fact that things are so complex. Rather than accept that complexity and subdivide the field into different disciplines, we should get rid of all this unneeded complexity to begin with.