[jtuente]

Too much trial and error and throwing everything they know at it until it gets close enough to the desired look. I have one co-worker that has taken off after I showed him how to use dev tools and another that's still trying to guess their way through the problem after showing them how to use dev tools.

[devonkim]

I’ll never forget the time a network engineer escalated a ticket of his to me on the infrastructure side (think L4+ support) that a developer threw his way saying that his web pages were loading really slowly and that this was a high priority, high urgency project. I asked how they came to the conclusion that it was something related to the cloud infrastructure rather than something else? They said the developer didn’t really know besides to ask “network people.” So I get on a webex with the parties where even a VP is on there because his product launch is on the hook and then I ask the developer to open developer tools to which he responded “what’s that?” I think I had to mute myself for a bit while I screamed for a while that this was what qualified one to be a senior front end engineer at the company. So I stepped through and got the network transfer chart and pinpointed that all traffic was coming through quickly except there was a big initial delay while doing DNS look-ups that was super slow to get the first byte. The network engineer on the call was stunned that such a thing existed and thanked me for saving him a ton of grief because he got a LOT of ticket like this one.

This wasn’t in like 2010 when Firebug was just coming out and people still used Firefox as a rule, this was like 2015 when dev tools was in every shipping browser approved for corporate use by a technology laggard company.

So the moral of the story is just blame DNS first.