Overheard a senior dev say beginners should skip HTML/CSS and go straight to React

I was grabbing coffee at a coworking space downtown and two devs were talking loud enough for everyone to hear. One guy said beginners shouldn't waste time on HTML and CSS, just jump into React and learn the real stuff. That honestly made me mad. I've been learning coding for about 6 months now and I started with basic HTML pages and CSS layouts. Without that foundation I would have no clue what React components are actually doing under the hood. My instructor told me last week that 80% of frontend work is still just styling and structure, not fancy state management. Has anyone else run into people pushing frameworks on total newbies?

2 comments

2 Comments

kim_west23d ago

My friend tried to learn React without knowing CSS and spent two hours trying to figure out why his button was floating off the screen (turns out he forgot to close a div). He called me in a panic and I'm pretty sure we both aged ten years that afternoon.

laura18922d agoOG Member

Oh man, @kim_west that is painfully relatable. I once spent an entire afternoon wondering why my text was invisible, only to realize I had set the color to white on a white background. I think I was on my third cup of coffee by then and my brain had just checked out. Honestly, we've all been that friend who calls in a panic over something that ends up being a missing bracket or a typo. It's the circle of life in coding - you learn by making the dumbest mistakes possible. At least your friend had you to call, I had to stare at my screen and cry a little before figuring it out.