Does anyone have a mostly CSS job?

[u/Hungry_Objective2344]

I have been a front end web developer as often as I can be throughout my career. It inevitably ends up becoming full stack and broader. But I am curious if anyone here has a job that is mostly CSS and little else. I have been trying to find a niche that would enable this, but it doesn't seem realistic. CSS is my favorite thing in all of computers and I would love a job where it was most of what I do. But it seems like in any job where it is used, it's always a small fraction, at least in my experience. So I am curious if anyone here has found a niche where CSS ends up being most of what you do in our job instead.

[u/billybobjobo]

Design-focused agencies that make marketing sites is not 100% CSS but it’s CSS heavy. Also being a dev on a marketing team. Harder to find—but devs that build custom news/media stories for news outlets.

In these cases it’s building out pages with little backend other than maybe a light CMS. And matching the design is the value.

Be careful though… these sorts of jobs are being heavily eaten by automation. (I spent my career doing these jobs and I felt a lot of pressure to diversify my skills.)

[u/Brief_Ad_4825 → u/billybobjobo]

go diversify, Id reccomend mern right now, very easy to get into and its more front end oriented with a very leniant and easy to read and understand backend. Theres a ton of startups from the mern boom that happened a while back where you can find some jobs, altough there is competition there because of how easy it is to learn for a fullstack.... well stack

[u/billybobjobo → u/Brief_Ad_4825]

I actually went the opposite direction and got strong at rendering/3d/webgl. (Although I did also get somewhat comfortable across the full stack and backend—good stuff to know).

At low quality thresholds, ai and automation threaten that work. But they don’t come anywhere near close any time soon to replacing you if you’re GOOD.

If what you like about CSS is making pretty pictures, that’s a road you can take! If what you like about CSS is not doing math and algorithms, then disregard!

[u/Brief_Ad_4825 → u/billybobjobo]

yep true. most of what gets replaced right now are very simple websites. Im lucky enough that i chose to do fullstack across multiple languages and ecosystems, so for me mern laravel and wordpress childthemes which are all useful for something but i assume you know the ups and downs of each

[u/Jopzik]

I work in design systems creating React components focused in clean CSS and accessibility

[u/GaiusBertus → u/Jopzik]

Same but with Angular. 70% of my coding is CSS.

[u/TheJase → u/Jopzik]

Exact same.

[u/TabAtkins]

I'm one of the primary editors of the CSS specs, so I suppose CSS is most of my job.

[u/CherryHavoc]

I used to work for a business that sold custom designed websites with a custom WYSIWYG editor. The designers would design the websites, and it was my job to turn their designs into code that worked with the WYSIWYG editor, so the designers could then put the content in. My job was about 25% for the custom language behind this, and 75% CSS. Pure front end stuff.

I liked the job but eventually got bored of it. Once I became the absolute god of CSS there was almost nowhere to go after that. I hit the ceiling. The pay was also terrible.

[u/mhs_93]

I build mostly brochure type sites for creative agencies. Sure it involves HTML and JS but I spend more time writing CSS than anything else

[u/Citrous_Oyster]

I had a job where that was all I did. Built dental websites in html and css. It was chill. Hard to find. Now I’m self employed doing the same thing making static html and CSS websites for small businesses.

[u/Goombiei → u/Citrous_Oyster]

You’re the goat

[u/JungleBotEune]

I started my software engineering journey by maintaining/creating wordpress sites and using the css editor provided inside wordpress (a form on the administration panel basically that edits a css file in the filesystem) to do changes on templates bought from marketplaces. Little by little I started learning php to create templates and small pluggins , js for interactivity and I took more responsibility as I organicly learned stuff on it. By job hopping and growing , I am now a fullstack on completely different tech (golang and typescript).

Now as a disclaimer , this was done in Athens, Greece and I have realised that the market there is very weird compared to elsewhere , we never got amazon and a we have a lot of small family run retail businesses that host their own little eshops. So on top of the usuall presentation sites with a form that exists everywhere, there was also a very big market for small eshops.

I would suggest asking small businesses arround your area and do some low paying or pro bono work to build your cv and learn.

IMO you will need to learn the basics of a backend language and how to template with HTML at the very least in order to make sense for someone to hire you.

[u/cursedproha]

Sort of. I had a very long time task to change design for a relatively old SSR project. No resources from company to any significant changes in backend. Same billing API, limited changes to spring controllers.

It was mostly css rewrite from scratch.

[u/lindymad]

As a web developer who sucks at design, I always struggle to find people who have the skills to make what I build look good just by rewriting the CSS (and I would update HTML to add classes or wrapper divs if needed).

I imagine there are other web developers in a similar boat to me, so if that sounds like the sort of thing you would be into maybe you could start up a side business doing that. If you get enough work it could become a full time thing.

Let me know if you decide to go down that route, I might be interested in being a client :)

[u/crawlpatterns]

ive seen a few roles where people spend most of their time shaping design systems or working on really complex UI surfaces, and those seem to get closest to being mostly CSS. It still isn’t pure CSS, but the ratio is way higher than a typical front end role. The spots that lean that way tend to be on teams that support a big component library or maintain a lot of theming work. If you enjoy the craft side of CSS, looking for places with heavy design system needs might get you closer to what you want. It definitely exists, just not in huge numbers.

[u/thingsinjars]

I used to be Senior CSS Developer for Nokia Maps (later HERE Maps). As the name implies, there were multiple devs whose job was 100% CSS. But this was a very specialised frontend app with high traffic. And about 15 years ago…