I have no problem hacking up some figma design in html / react. The problem is that it isn't reusable, it isn't clean components, styles are copy pasted from figma to the component and unlined with BEM.
The problem isn't a skill issue on my end, I could build it cleanly, I just don't know why I would when the other 1200 engineers I work with don't have any incentive to do so.
Figma is a shit version of Dreamweaver, a html based WYSIWYG from the 00s.
Figma made a mistake including the absolute positioning in their Dev mode. It's never useful, and leads to confused engineers like this.
Figma is a design tool. It is used by designers as a way to build the visual mocks of software. It's not building HTML under the hood. As a frontend engineer, I have to interpret the designs given to me and translate the layouts into something that will be responsive, cope with different data, etc. that part is the job of a frontend engineer, and so far there is no tooling that solves that.
The Figma dev mode helps shortcut some of that work, by providing easy copy-paste for attributes like background, border, fonts, spacing etc. it's a timesaver. But you should never copy the whole thing.
If a project is really mature, reusable components in design tools can work. But for early stage stuff, they can quickly prove more trouble than they're worth.
The designer's job is to think creatively, on behalf of the user, through the entire system, the states, the transitions. Faffing around with reusable components gets in the way of the right kind of thought, IMHO. It's like the design version of big complex class hierarchies. Done too early, they will really slow you down.
I completely agree. But I've replied to someone who's been complaining that they don't get reusable components "from figma" when, in fact, it's the designers choice to not do that (for whatever good or bad reason).
The problem isn't a skill issue on my end, I could build it cleanly, I just don't know why I would when the other 1200 engineers I work with don't have any incentive to do so.
Figma is a shit version of Dreamweaver, a html based WYSIWYG from the 00s.