alt Hacker News> JavaScript frameworks have deskilled frontend development in the last decade. As someone who started with HTML/CSS and a bit of PHP, later did Ruby on Rails, and then was frontend team lead of a major Swiss newspaper (Next.js at the time), I’ve seen the transformation first-hand
I'm sorry but that simply does not make any sense. How is increasing the breadth of your skills leading to a deskilling?
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The article explains at length what they mean by "deskilling" and it does not mean that individuals lose their skills.
The author having worked with various technologies over time is also not an example of "deskilling", it's a way of asserting that they have had time to observe the deskilling of the domain (since deskilling means a particular domain requires less specialised skills than it did before, not that the workers are losing skills) happen.
The phenomenon of bootcamp graduates who knew React but did not know JavaScript.
I guess the author never tried to write big FE application in jQuery :D It definitely required some skill.
Just watch the terrible soup produced by MIT-bred Leetcode ninja "engineers" in money raining startups and FAANGs.
Low accessibility, terrible performance, lack of any fundamentals of html and css, abuse of those awful solutions like Tailwind or using 2016 technologies like React for rendering what should mostly be static websites + some web component, all plagued by memory leaks and very basic usability bugs.
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Read in context. He's referring to the evolution of skill at group level, he even puts out the definition of deskilling and mentions 'skilled labor'. He then explains how frontend used to be a 'highly specialized skill', and how modern devs use Frameworks to consider browsers almost hidden compilation targets.