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FURGIE πŸ“Έ πŸ§–πŸΎ
FURGIE πŸ“Έ πŸ§–πŸΎ

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Can I get a high-paying job with just CSS and HTML skills?

I just wondered if anyone has a job where they only use CSS and HTML? And earn a good amount of money just from those two?

If not, why is that? Is it cause CSS and HTML is pretty basic compared to JavaScript/REACT?

Top comments (11)

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cmgorton profile image
Christina • Edited

I got a high paying job with only HTML and CSS but I wouldn't say it is the norm. I don't think it is because CSS and HTML is basic compared to JavaScript. They are just different skillsets. Many great JavaScript developers write horrible CSS and HTML and vice versa. Companies now want CSS experts to either have Design skills or or also know JavaScript. Larger companies can afford to have niche experts (I've worked as just an animation developer for several companies) but smaller companies look more and more for anyone with front-end skills to gravitate more towards full-stack. I think it has more to do with trying to get the most "bang for their buck" from developers.

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cmgorton profile image
Christina

Also if you want to focus on CSS and HTML look for UI engineer titles. Those often focus on CSS and HTML and a little JavaScript depending on the company.

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mccurcio profile image
Matt C

This is really interesting! I feel like I was TOLD (by misinformed teachers) to focus on JS to the detriment of html & css. I wrongly believed this for too long. That was a mistake.

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furgieofficial profile image
FURGIE πŸ“Έ πŸ§–πŸΎ

That's what I understood to be true, but I see a lot of different opinions and I think it makes sense that the reality is different! I know JS and currently on React, but I do genuinely love and want to experiment with HTML and CSS the most

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furgieofficial profile image
FURGIE πŸ“Έ πŸ§–πŸΎ

Thank you for this and the earlier response! I really appreciate it, I will take all that onboard :)

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ludwiczakpawel profile image
PaweΕ‚ Ludwiczak

I think there are at least two profitable* paths you could take:

Emails

One of the ways for building email templates (newsletters, transactionals, some announcements, etc) is by writing HTML & CSS only (well, mostly). Of course there are ready-to-use templates and services providing templates and similar functionality (mailchimp, etc) but I know at least several people with their primary focus being on emails creation. Building emails, even though it's just HTML & CSS is so much different than building web sites.

I consider myself pretty experienced when it comes to HTML & CSS but at the same time it's extremely hard for me to build bulletproof email. And I think "bulletproof" is the key word here - there are tons of email clients (maybe even more than web browsers) and lots of them require very special treatment. And it's not only about the very old clients (aka IE6 of email clients) but also modern ones.

To better visualize differences between websites coding and emails coding: building emails still requires using tables for creating layout or sometimes even simple buttons.

Again, it depends on what email clients you're required to support but using tables is basically unavoidable.

And because of that, I think building emails requires very special set of skills even though it's just HTML & CSS.

Animations

There are companies/startups that care A LOT about interactive elements and how content is visualized on their pages. Very often this shares territories with animations (think of fancy landing pages with flying elements, etc). Even though there are JS libraries helping with this task, there are still people primarily focused on building these animations. And in most cases, HTML & CSS is just enough to build even pretty complex animations.


* - you asked about high-paying job but it's very subjective to determine what's high vs low paying job. That's why I chose to use word "profitable" which you can understand as simply as "paying job".

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furgieofficial profile image
FURGIE πŸ“Έ πŸ§–πŸΎ

Thank you for this! I dug a little into animations with CSS and HTML, which was a lot of fun but I definitely want to spend a whole day just creating more animations, complex ones with HTML and CSS and better understand the whole process

Thank you for such a great response, genuinely and really appreciate it!

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

You can get a high-paying with CSS and HTML as useful skills but not on their own... If you are on the business or content or design side of things, having a great understanding of HTML/CSS can be a great skill set to augment you.

So: Designers/content creators can do great without knowing more than CSS/HTML (and don't even need that a lot of the time), but for software development work, the dividing line between tasks is rarely granular enough to get by without a slightly broader skillset.

While you won't get universal agreement on anything like this, the idea of the T-shaped engineer is one worth considering. Your main thing can be CSS/HTML but you want other complementary skillsets so you can best fit into a team fluidly as needed. Sometimes you'll only need to do markup/design, but it helps if you can dip int JavaScript as needed. And the more flexibly you can contribute, the higher likelihood you get to "high paid".

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furgieofficial profile image
FURGIE πŸ“Έ πŸ§–πŸΎ

This is such a beautifully written response! Thank you so so so so much! Really appreciate it and thank you for letting me know about T-shaped engineer :) I really appreciate this

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debrakayelliott profile image
Debra-Kaye Elliott

Thank you for asking this! I keep wondering if there are actually any jobs available to someone new to development and learning these two fundamental skills (as so strongly advised). There’s so much praise about JS and frameworks, and it’s made to seem like learning HTML & CSS fundamentals can be done overnight to jump to JS and frameworks.

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furgieofficial profile image
FURGIE πŸ“Έ πŸ§–πŸΎ

For me personally, HTML and CSS was very straight forward and I was able to understand it as well as remember majority of it fairly easily.

JavaScript is just on another world - no comparison, I've finished my JavaScript course and I'm still having to go back to videos etc to understand it better. I definitely struggle with it.

To me, JavaScript is completely on a different level compared to HTML and CSS. A whole different world