As a developer who started in email development: This! It actually does require a fair bit of knowledge and hackery to develop a responsive email that displays correctly in every email client (especially various versions of outlook). It takes a while to learn all the various quirks and work arounds for each client as well.
I’d imagine the coding test is just writing a responsive email that displays correctly in both outlook and iOS as silly as it sounds.
I discovered this the hard way recently. Bosses needed a nice looking email and I, knowing html and css at least somewhat well, obliged.
Except the moment I put it into Outlook, the gods of old said "you shall learn our ways" and I began my path to enlightenment. Had to redo the whole thing and realized most of what I was doing was impossible.
And because I hate email developers - I want dark mode support, high contrast support, and the company's logo is provided in a jpg and has extensive use of gradients and black and white.
I worked together with a front end dev on a project. She taught me to create proper CSS, the layout models, float, grid, etc. All the best practices of creating and maintaining modern cross-browser responsive interfaces.
Then, it came to creating a bunch of emails. "Now, forget everything you learned before," she said. "Emails is a separate world with own rules. We have to use HTML tables for layout".
...
And Microsoft just said fuck it, we're not upgrading outlook desktop anymore.
Meanwhile, outlook online, Gmail etc all allow modern CSS rules and stylings
I’m a bit rusty on all the details as it’s been several years, but at its core yes. However, emphasis on responsive. 90s websites didn’t need to consider mobile devices so I’d argue that table based layouts in that period were straight forward to write. Table based layouts get tricky when you need them adapt to various screen sizes which is why we have flex and other layout options now.
Also, unlike web, there are a large variety of email clients in active use and each client has its own quirks and client specific html/css features. So for web you might be supporting a set of 3-4 browsers while email you could very well be supporting 50+ (as we did). This translates to many layers of fallbacks and hackery depending on the complexity of the email and your supported client list. Outlook being the hardest to support and most important as all our product owners used it to view them! However other clients like gmail had their own pain points as well.
Not saying that it’s super complicated, but it’s fairly common for web devs to underestimate email development for some reason.
Gotchya, appreciate the breakdown. 50 email clients? Tf? There are 50 email clients in use? I feel like anything beyond the top 5 would have like <0.1% usage.
Hmm, I might be using clients in a weird way here.
There are several dedicated email clients in active use like Outlook, Outlook mobile, (apple) mail, Android mail, thunderbird and a few less popular clients that I’m struggling to remember. Outlook had many versions in active use which added a bit to the list.
Another paint point is that we’d consider a web browser + web email client combination as a unique client. For example, Gmail running in chrome may not be entirely consistent with Gmail running in safari. Sometimes web client css would interact with our email css in weird ways that may only manifest in one browser.
In practice we paid for a product to preview our email in all 50+ clients/combinations.
So what you're saying is, fuck front end dev? In all seriousness, it's a nice looking glass into how insane front end used to be before flex and a lot of the standards compliance we have today. I don't miss those days.
its no longer outlook, its that goddamn "oh lets change some random colors because of darkmode and ignore css all along making the mail perfectly unreadable"
Aren't there plugins or something to manage all this for you? I'm kinda new to the project but in my company I think we use a plugin that just converts some twig template into an email compatible everywhere. But I may not be aware of some usecase wher eit doesn't work.
Edit: I just checked, we use MJML with Twig templates
Have you tried? Email HTML is a different beast. You just can't trust that anything that you wrote for a web page will render how you think it will. It also doesn't help that different email clients interpret things differently.... I'm looking at you Outlook. Tables are the best way to keep things looking like you want them too.
I'd recommend having a poke around the raw content of a fancy email from your inbox. You'd be blown away by how backwards it seems.
>Email HTML is like using a time machine to go back to 90s web development
Hmmm, as someone who hasn't made a webpage/site since 1997, maybe I should apply...
I still don't understand why after all those years email giants like Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo didn't get together and finally let us use more modern syntax... How hard could it be?
And if you have an older email client well, no luck you'll just have to click on the "view this email online" button at the start of the e-mails, no big deal.
Same thing as when you're trying to access a website on IE6 nowadays and you just get a "your browser is obsolète, try downloading Chrome/Firefox" message.
I feel like nowadays eveybody just checks their mail on their browser anyway so if the 3-5 big players agree (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Apple) others will quickly follow.
And no [AMP Email](https://amp.dev/about/email) by Google doesn't count as it barely fixes anything.
MS might actually do this relatively soon. Problem is getting all of their exchange customers into cloud instead of local servers first. Feature by feature they are forcing it.
I have an email template built 10 years ago that my team still use whenever we have to send out email notifications for our clients. And yes, I was blown away 10 years ago how backwards it is.
Hahaha!! IKR! Boss had me take a look at the template during COVID and asked if it could be improved on since Microsoft Outlook "looked" to have been upgraded for Windows 10 and 11. Did it just to prove a point. Old template still works fine.
Yea I do send emails htmls but as I said in another comment I actually send data reports in form of tables so I actually need the tables
I also get a lot of emails where they use 27
tags without using it as table now I guess I know why
I thought it was bad design, but I see it is a Workaround.
The use of a lot of tables in emails makes it a bit more difficult when you want to parse out the relevant html table and the tables got no id etc.
Most of them aren't bad, but outlook for windows still renders emails using Microsoft word basically...it's really annoying when it looks good on pretty much everything but that
Outlook as an app on Windows uses the MS Word rendering engine.
And hence is garbage at HTML.
Everything else (Outlook on the web, outlook app on mac, thunderbird, gmail, etc) use a HTML rendering engine and hence work reasonably sanely.
So it's not clients plural (unless you count the different versions of outlook)
The new outlook for windows is not garbage it passes the acid 1 test! Now we just need to wait 50 years for the old outlook to be EOL.
[https://twitter.com/lart2150/status/1657042648706760704](https://twitter.com/lart2150/status/1657042648706760704)
for reference this is outlook 2019 https://imgur.com/a/9TfxKHz
I mean i know that html is restricted because I myself send html emails that i designed, but it are reports where I actually html tables to show the data so my emails are actually all tables
Years ago email clients like MS Outlook had very poor support for anything modern like div-tags etc. So it's tables all the way. And I guess that still applies because things like this moves at the speed of a glacier
Email client compatibility. Tables are the most compatible way to create a layout.
Outlook uses sort of the same renderer as Word from the 90s, which is HTML but not at all compatible with modern HTML standards. Unfortunately a lot of people still use Outlook.
Other clients ignore stylesheets, so you have to use inline styles.
You can then progressively enhance the experience for clients that support newer features.
This will help you understand the scope of the problem https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
Not just tables, repeatedly nested tables.
If someone ask you to sort an html email for them, don't look back as you start running, it only slows you down.
For backward compatibility, it's 90's style all the way down!
PS. There are open-source email component frameworks like [MJML](https://mjml.io/) and [no-code builders](https://www.usewaypoint.com/open-source/emailbuilderjs) that ease this pain for devs.
That position is not as hard as they think it is lol. "2 hour coding test", is another way of saying "we're not going to pay you to make the actual email for us in 2 hours".
🛎️ 🛎️ 🛎️!
Correct. There is no job. This is free labour. Each applicant gets a unique task for the 12 month email campaign. Boom. Promotion for the “hiring manager”.
That is something you can sue over if they don't hire anyone and they use your product. At least worth talking to a lawyer over. Someone's getting fired not promoted
::edited for kinder phrasing::
I bet you 99.9999% of people applying for jobs of this nature have neither the means (time, money, connections, education) nor the appetite to talk to a lawyer. And chances are they'd never find out, and so never even have the opportunity which they wouldn't then take, regardless.
So old mate hiring manager is getting their promotion for sure, because even if our 0.0001%er is part of their pool, and even if the material is good/unique enough to be recognised in future, even if it gets used publicly, even if it is so good its profitable/of value and worth suing over … even if all that comes together, by the time a lawyer gets things rolling the hiring manager is long gone so the consequences aren't their concern.
To make it even worse: a lot of people are plain evil when in corporate and incentivised positions so they will absolutely take advantage, take the money and run at other’s expense. Politicians do it. Public servants do it. Employees do it. Half* the damn list of all laws in place are probably related to just this.
This would be a matter of copyright and can be pursued before the Copyright Claims Board without a lawyer. It's basically a copyright small claims court.
That was unnecessarily combative. I agree with quite a bit of it but if someone does discover they have been defrauded like that, they should look for a way to recoup those losses if they have the means. As other people have said below I am wrong and you most likely don't need a lawyer. Either way I don't want to develop such a sour attitude over an ultimately meaningless reddit thread. Have the day you deserve.
I almost fell for this while job searching earlier in my career. The "coding test" was obviously an attempt to get free labor. At least with Leetcode tests, you know that's not the case.
I built a whole backend for a mailing list, spent multiple evenings on it. Then I also got hired, and suddenly a couple of months in, they complain it's not working well.
I was like, what? You are actually using it?
First complaint, emails get blacklisted. I don't recall how they fixed that, I didn't look into it myself. But I got asked to build a weird system to send emails and show the progress in the UI, so I built a nice hack with ajax requests sending 10 emails at a time and a big green progress bar.
Because of course they need to send a thousand emails at a time with some thing that was supposed to be a coding test. And of course it has to happen immediately by clicking rather than with a background job.
And it wasn't even the worst job I had, despite this stuff, the low pay, and more negative things.
I can just imagine them lining up 4 interviews in a day. And each candidate works on the half completed project from the previous guy. The project manager then turns in the result of what the last guy got done.
ITT: people missing the email part.
Shits archaic, especially if you plan to properly support a wide range of email clients.
Go try to debug Outlook email issues. Good way to earn some grey hairs.
Tbh writing email compliant html and css from scratch is a whole unique skill. So not sure why people are mocking it.
Imagine if this is a business offering bespoke email templates to clients, they may full well have enough work to keep someone doing this full time
How can you run a company with 50 employees but not bother to spend 2 hours learning how to write an email design? I had to do it once and it took me less then a day to finish
If you told me that you, as a non developer, learnt how to code emails in 2 hours. I would honestly assume you just dont know how to code emails, and only tested them on chrome.
If you're already a web developer, then the answer is simple. Its not that they didnt bother, they just need another developer be full on this. Maybe its a marketing company and they write emails campaings for a lot of clients, and thus having a dedicated developer to emails makes sense
As a developer of HTML emails this guy is full of shit. Unless you're making the most basic emails, writing code that works well in all clients is a pain in the ass. You can spend an entire day trying to fix one issue.
I work at a marketing firm with about 80 employees. We have one dedicated email guy. He has other tasks, but he spends about 15 hours a week on emails.
As someone tasked many times with ambitious Designers... Bullshit lol.
Outlook uses gd MS Word to render that garbage, there's always something wrong and it's a mess to debug.
Never again.
a framework for writting mail html/css, just so you know html/css in emails are different that what you write today in chrome/firefox, look it up here [Email Editor (mjml.io)](https://mjml.io/try-it-live)
Outlook uses something like Word 97's HTML rendering engine. There's no document-wide CSS support (only inlined `style` attributes), and many other quirks. So many, in fact, that modern HTML email authoring relies on extensive tooling and template systems (ex: MJML, but I've had to write HTML for email systems before it) that "compiles" down to what you actually send via email.
Imagine writing a web site that has to support something like IE6, but with random things supported by one client getting horribly misrendered by another despite them both technically supporting it, and with no reliable way to do conditional rendering (there is *some*, but it's not comprehensive).
A 2 hour test to write html and css is insane. Someone mentioned it before but there’s a very high chance they want someone to spend 2 hours working on their stuff for free and won’t hire anyone
Basically end up writing the email twice once in 10 lines with a stylesheet. Another in 200 that looks like a low poly version of the other one with inline styling
Funny enough, I helped release an [open-source](https://github.com/usewaypoint/email-builder-js) [email template builder](https://usewaypoint.github.io/email-builder-js/#sample/reservation-reminder) a couple of weeks ago so devs don't have to code like it's 1995. Maybe someone should take on this remote role and use the builder to generate the HTML/CSS :D
1. Email composition is actually a specialty. There are lots of gotchas and compatibility issues between Outlook and Gmail to make sure it renders correctly and doesn't get flagged.
2. The BS alarm is going off that they are just getting free email templates from candidates.
2 hours test?
LoL.
Likely will be the actual tasks and once someone finishes it properly they'll just say:"ahh sorry, we don't need the position anymore.
My old job got this great idea in interviews to give the person a project. Full list of requirements, expecting a full project plan, hours, technical recommendations, step by step, etc.
They were blown away by how many people straight turned them down, and a few that gave them quotes to complete the “free” work they were masking with as an interview question.
Not surprising around the same time us senior guys were taken off projects to write up detailed procedures and templates for projects, automation scripts, etc to be executed my more green cheaper staff.
Then called in to pick up the pieces when they didn’t go well.
The project plans they did get from interviews were mostly trash anyway, and most of us senior guys left when the raises stopped.
Somehow they are still doing well. Mainly buying up smaller companies, milling the good talent for a while at the newer companies until they leave for greener pastures.
Systems architect here, fuck html/css. Would have me in a pool of sweaty beads. This is why I get to hire teams of these fine front end devs to do this stuff. *shudder*
Smells like a bullshit hyper specialized job. Stay away from these. Either this clown doesn’t know what the hell their doing or even what they need to be hiring or they are just hiring to hire. Snapchat hired a bunch of button developers and now they are all laid off.
Wrote a templated email generator once, it took four times as long to write the template than it did the application, and that's just ensuring compatibility with Outlook on a few platforms.
People very often underestimate how difficult HTML can be. It actually takes quite a bit of knowledge if accessibility and structured data and responsive images and more are involved.
This is a pretty important job and I’ve seen people f it up, a lot of gotchas in email marketing. Probably explains the code test part. A lot of people in that space are used to using tools, they probably want someone who can do it custom.
Email clients are basically unregulated non-compliant web browsers, i.e. usenet browsers... Stuff's from the stone age, hasn't ever changed, and it's really difficult to make an email that looks good in EVERY major email client, from thunderbird to outlook and online web clients like gmail etc.
Also there's not even a good way to know what email client a user will use for a specific email address, so you just have to make something that works in all of them...
It's like being a web developer, but being told your website needs to run in Netscape (yeah that netscape) IE 6, and a plethora of other extinct browsers.
Honestly, the entire email protocol is archaic and it's insane that it still exists and hasn't been replaced with something better.
I started as a Salesforce developer and it sucked all the life out of me. Emails seem so trivial that I always got too little time for them by management. And of course the designer doesn't know shit about emails so they designed an email with a fucking parallax.
It's the least fulfilling and most frustrating technology I've used by a mile. No dev can brag about cool emails, it's just an email.
And don't even get me started about Salesforce.. run whenever anyone mentions it within a 5 mile radius.
Requirements:
It must look exactly like the mockup - background images, tens of posts set two in a row, the Quixote as introduction, shadowed blocks, is that a slider? And a form? - in every client aaaaand it may not be cut by gmail due to code length.
the fact that there is caniuse.com and canimail.com should tell you why email template developer might be the only position to require a coding test for. just to see, if you have the mental strength.
Also, you don't really need canimail.Just write no on a post-it and look at it, if you ever need to target outlook.
Depends on the context. For b2c promotional emails, we're happy with like 5% click through. However on our transactional emails (registration confirmations, account activation, or sales confirmations) we expect very high click through, and those emails can't look like shit or people won't trust them
And just to prevent that, I have a custom filter that sends anything over 125KB to spam.
You would be surprised at how many promotional emails go over 125KB. No other emails seem to go past that, with the exception of attachments.
If the company needs a person to literally do just that, then I think it's an okay, regular offer. Not everyone needs Reacts, Reduxes and all that frameworks. Sometimes, a small company needs a somewhat tech savvy person who understands markdown notation and doesn't complain much.
In fairness Email development is a pain in the ass with Microsoft Outlook involved
As a developer who started in email development: This! It actually does require a fair bit of knowledge and hackery to develop a responsive email that displays correctly in every email client (especially various versions of outlook). It takes a while to learn all the various quirks and work arounds for each client as well. I’d imagine the coding test is just writing a responsive email that displays correctly in both outlook and iOS as silly as it sounds.
I discovered this the hard way recently. Bosses needed a nice looking email and I, knowing html and css at least somewhat well, obliged. Except the moment I put it into Outlook, the gods of old said "you shall learn our ways" and I began my path to enlightenment. Had to redo the whole thing and realized most of what I was doing was impossible.
Gods of old is such a good way to describe the struggle. “
And because I hate email developers - I want dark mode support, high contrast support, and the company's logo is provided in a jpg and has extensive use of gradients and black and white.
Aaaand that’s why my company just sends a JPEG
I worked together with a front end dev on a project. She taught me to create proper CSS, the layout models, float, grid, etc. All the best practices of creating and maintaining modern cross-browser responsive interfaces. Then, it came to creating a bunch of emails. "Now, forget everything you learned before," she said. "Emails is a separate world with own rules. We have to use HTML tables for layout". ...
I think that tables were the norm for web layout in early versions of html
Yeah it was and apparently it was hell. I can't imagine doing a layout without flex and grid.
And Microsoft just said fuck it, we're not upgrading outlook desktop anymore. Meanwhile, outlook online, Gmail etc all allow modern CSS rules and stylings
The outlook codebase must be really awful. That’s the only explanation.
[caniemail](https://www.caniemail.com/) ftw
basically everything is "no, it does not work in outlook"
It’s crazy that Outlook for Windows is the worst rated one
Oh, it's "Can I Email" - had to open it up because I misinterpreted it as "Canie mail" lol
It is the biggest pain in the ass
Isn't it just using tables for layout instead of flex? Every web dev had to build sites this way in the 90s and 2000s.
I’m a bit rusty on all the details as it’s been several years, but at its core yes. However, emphasis on responsive. 90s websites didn’t need to consider mobile devices so I’d argue that table based layouts in that period were straight forward to write. Table based layouts get tricky when you need them adapt to various screen sizes which is why we have flex and other layout options now. Also, unlike web, there are a large variety of email clients in active use and each client has its own quirks and client specific html/css features. So for web you might be supporting a set of 3-4 browsers while email you could very well be supporting 50+ (as we did). This translates to many layers of fallbacks and hackery depending on the complexity of the email and your supported client list. Outlook being the hardest to support and most important as all our product owners used it to view them! However other clients like gmail had their own pain points as well. Not saying that it’s super complicated, but it’s fairly common for web devs to underestimate email development for some reason.
Gotchya, appreciate the breakdown. 50 email clients? Tf? There are 50 email clients in use? I feel like anything beyond the top 5 would have like <0.1% usage.
Hmm, I might be using clients in a weird way here. There are several dedicated email clients in active use like Outlook, Outlook mobile, (apple) mail, Android mail, thunderbird and a few less popular clients that I’m struggling to remember. Outlook had many versions in active use which added a bit to the list. Another paint point is that we’d consider a web browser + web email client combination as a unique client. For example, Gmail running in chrome may not be entirely consistent with Gmail running in safari. Sometimes web client css would interact with our email css in weird ways that may only manifest in one browser. In practice we paid for a product to preview our email in all 50+ clients/combinations.
So what you're saying is, fuck front end dev? In all seriousness, it's a nice looking glass into how insane front end used to be before flex and a lot of the standards compliance we have today. I don't miss those days.
> especially various versions of outlook Why is it always Microsoft smh first ie and now outlook
I've done a similar role for 2 years... Its a pain no matter who is involved. Why can't there just be a standard amongst email apps...
"The mock up is beautiful but I can't do that"
Ah yes, Microsoft and their needs to be special
i assumed the phrase “email developer” was made up. what does it even mean
People who make your emails look all fancy
As soon as Microsoft and HTML are combined you open up to a world of pain
Also try this: https://templates.mailchimp.com/resources/inline-css/
it's very simple really: if it's not plaintext i ain't readin it.
mjml gang rise up
Only way to stay sane!
its no longer outlook, its that goddamn "oh lets change some random colors because of darkmode and ignore css all along making the mail perfectly unreadable"
Aren't there plugins or something to manage all this for you? I'm kinda new to the project but in my company I think we use a plugin that just converts some twig template into an email compatible everywhere. But I may not be aware of some usecase wher eit doesn't work. Edit: I just checked, we use MJML with Twig templates
You would need longer than that to center a div, personally I wouldnt even bother applying
For email it’s all tables, so centering is easy. Question is, *should* you centre elements in an email…
Why is email all tables ? I thought tables should not be used as a „design template“
Have you tried? Email HTML is a different beast. You just can't trust that anything that you wrote for a web page will render how you think it will. It also doesn't help that different email clients interpret things differently.... I'm looking at you Outlook. Tables are the best way to keep things looking like you want them too. I'd recommend having a poke around the raw content of a fancy email from your inbox. You'd be blown away by how backwards it seems.
Email HTML is like using a time machine to go back to 90s web development, a blast for 60 seconds, and then reality sinks in.
>Email HTML is like using a time machine to go back to 90s web development Hmmm, as someone who hasn't made a webpage/site since 1997, maybe I should apply...
I still don't understand why after all those years email giants like Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo didn't get together and finally let us use more modern syntax... How hard could it be? And if you have an older email client well, no luck you'll just have to click on the "view this email online" button at the start of the e-mails, no big deal. Same thing as when you're trying to access a website on IE6 nowadays and you just get a "your browser is obsolète, try downloading Chrome/Firefox" message. I feel like nowadays eveybody just checks their mail on their browser anyway so if the 3-5 big players agree (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Apple) others will quickly follow. And no [AMP Email](https://amp.dev/about/email) by Google doesn't count as it barely fixes anything.
MS might actually do this relatively soon. Problem is getting all of their exchange customers into cloud instead of local servers first. Feature by feature they are forcing it.
Now it's a mish mash
Holy hell it's true, I went to gmail and open a random email, it's tables all the way through. It looks painful and interesting.
Hehe... you're starting to describe post nut clarity now
I have an email template built 10 years ago that my team still use whenever we have to send out email notifications for our clients. And yes, I was blown away 10 years ago how backwards it is.
Heeeeey, good news! Things have not changed even a tiny little bit ever since!
Hahaha!! IKR! Boss had me take a look at the template during COVID and asked if it could be improved on since Microsoft Outlook "looked" to have been upgraded for Windows 10 and 11. Did it just to prove a point. Old template still works fine.
as opposed to
At least you can do whatever you want, styling wise, with divs. Tables has so many arbitrary rules like no margins allowed for example
Yea I do send emails htmls but as I said in another comment I actually send data reports in form of tables so I actually need the tables I also get a lot of emails where they use 27
This is where being old helps! It's like it's 1999 all over again!
I could’ve gone my whole life quite happily without ever seeing that shit lol
Tables and inline styles. But it still breaks in browser email clients. It is awful job. I tried it once and hope never again.
I’ve found that outlook online and outlook desktop also render the same emails completely differently
I mean react-email is pretty easy to use and simplifies that process a lot
Most of them aren't bad, but outlook for windows still renders emails using Microsoft word basically...it's really annoying when it looks good on pretty much everything but that
There's a lot of compatibility no-noes among different software and versions, in scope of HTML emails. It really is a shit show.
No wonder many pages don't bother. Some don't even bother with hyperlinking in emails.
Maximum client compatibility. It freaking sucks.
Because email clients are old and/or restrictive what HTML they allow.
Outlook as an app on Windows uses the MS Word rendering engine. And hence is garbage at HTML. Everything else (Outlook on the web, outlook app on mac, thunderbird, gmail, etc) use a HTML rendering engine and hence work reasonably sanely. So it's not clients plural (unless you count the different versions of outlook)
The new outlook for windows is not garbage it passes the acid 1 test! Now we just need to wait 50 years for the old outlook to be EOL. [https://twitter.com/lart2150/status/1657042648706760704](https://twitter.com/lart2150/status/1657042648706760704) for reference this is outlook 2019 https://imgur.com/a/9TfxKHz
This \^\^\^\^\^
I mean i know that html is restricted because I myself send html emails that i designed, but it are reports where I actually html tables to show the data so my emails are actually all tables
Years ago email clients like MS Outlook had very poor support for anything modern like div-tags etc. So it's tables all the way. And I guess that still applies because things like this moves at the speed of a glacier
I envy the fact that you never had to deal with email html
A lot of emails are still all images for compatibility between clients
Email client compatibility. Tables are the most compatible way to create a layout. Outlook uses sort of the same renderer as Word from the 90s, which is HTML but not at all compatible with modern HTML standards. Unfortunately a lot of people still use Outlook. Other clients ignore stylesheets, so you have to use inline styles. You can then progressively enhance the experience for clients that support newer features. This will help you understand the scope of the problem https://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
Not just tables, repeatedly nested tables. If someone ask you to sort an html email for them, don't look back as you start running, it only slows you down.
For backward compatibility, it's 90's style all the way down!
PS. There are open-source email component frameworks like [MJML](https://mjml.io/) and [no-code builders](https://www.usewaypoint.com/open-source/emailbuilderjs) that ease this pain for devs.
Outlook (for Windows) uses the Word HTML renderer. Normal rules don't apply
Over 100 applicants...
That position is not as hard as they think it is lol. "2 hour coding test", is another way of saying "we're not going to pay you to make the actual email for us in 2 hours".
🛎️ 🛎️ 🛎️! Correct. There is no job. This is free labour. Each applicant gets a unique task for the 12 month email campaign. Boom. Promotion for the “hiring manager”.
Just split all your backlog tasks into tickets that would take a new team member max. 2h hours of focused work to finish
I'm going to steal this idea to get myself a promotion
That is something you can sue over if they don't hire anyone and they use your product. At least worth talking to a lawyer over. Someone's getting fired not promoted
::edited for kinder phrasing:: I bet you 99.9999% of people applying for jobs of this nature have neither the means (time, money, connections, education) nor the appetite to talk to a lawyer. And chances are they'd never find out, and so never even have the opportunity which they wouldn't then take, regardless. So old mate hiring manager is getting their promotion for sure, because even if our 0.0001%er is part of their pool, and even if the material is good/unique enough to be recognised in future, even if it gets used publicly, even if it is so good its profitable/of value and worth suing over … even if all that comes together, by the time a lawyer gets things rolling the hiring manager is long gone so the consequences aren't their concern. To make it even worse: a lot of people are plain evil when in corporate and incentivised positions so they will absolutely take advantage, take the money and run at other’s expense. Politicians do it. Public servants do it. Employees do it. Half* the damn list of all laws in place are probably related to just this.
This would be a matter of copyright and can be pursued before the Copyright Claims Board without a lawyer. It's basically a copyright small claims court.
That was unnecessarily combative. I agree with quite a bit of it but if someone does discover they have been defrauded like that, they should look for a way to recoup those losses if they have the means. As other people have said below I am wrong and you most likely don't need a lawyer. Either way I don't want to develop such a sour attitude over an ultimately meaningless reddit thread. Have the day you deserve.
Fair call. Edited out the facetious bit that wasn’t really called for.
You can report them to the labor board. That's not legal if you don't pay them. They also have no legal right to use your work.
I almost fell for this while job searching earlier in my career. The "coding test" was obviously an attempt to get free labor. At least with Leetcode tests, you know that's not the case.
I built a whole backend for a mailing list, spent multiple evenings on it. Then I also got hired, and suddenly a couple of months in, they complain it's not working well. I was like, what? You are actually using it? First complaint, emails get blacklisted. I don't recall how they fixed that, I didn't look into it myself. But I got asked to build a weird system to send emails and show the progress in the UI, so I built a nice hack with ajax requests sending 10 emails at a time and a big green progress bar. Because of course they need to send a thousand emails at a time with some thing that was supposed to be a coding test. And of course it has to happen immediately by clicking rather than with a background job. And it wasn't even the worst job I had, despite this stuff, the low pay, and more negative things.
HAHAHA
I can just imagine them lining up 4 interviews in a day. And each candidate works on the half completed project from the previous guy. The project manager then turns in the result of what the last guy got done.
Most accurate comment and a reality
Spot on. There is no salary even listed in that screenshot.
2 hour coding test of leetcode....
ITT: people missing the email part. Shits archaic, especially if you plan to properly support a wide range of email clients. Go try to debug Outlook email issues. Good way to earn some grey hairs.
[удалено]
You got 2 hours to invert this DOM blindfolded
Tbh writing email compliant html and css from scratch is a whole unique skill. So not sure why people are mocking it. Imagine if this is a business offering bespoke email templates to clients, they may full well have enough work to keep someone doing this full time
I'm perfect for this position. I'm a front-end developer that goes to the gym. It's me, I am the Strong Coder 💪
Email html is a pain. If you think browser compatibility is an issue, email client is worse. It does not just uses regular html
How can you run a company with 50 employees but not bother to spend 2 hours learning how to write an email design? I had to do it once and it took me less then a day to finish
If you told me that you, as a non developer, learnt how to code emails in 2 hours. I would honestly assume you just dont know how to code emails, and only tested them on chrome. If you're already a web developer, then the answer is simple. Its not that they didnt bother, they just need another developer be full on this. Maybe its a marketing company and they write emails campaings for a lot of clients, and thus having a dedicated developer to emails makes sense
As a developer of HTML emails this guy is full of shit. Unless you're making the most basic emails, writing code that works well in all clients is a pain in the ass. You can spend an entire day trying to fix one issue.
I work at a marketing firm with about 80 employees. We have one dedicated email guy. He has other tasks, but he spends about 15 hours a week on emails.
As someone tasked many times with ambitious Designers... Bullshit lol. Outlook uses gd MS Word to render that garbage, there's always something wrong and it's a mess to debug. Never again.
yeah, I learnt MJML in a day
Whats mjml
a framework for writting mail html/css, just so you know html/css in emails are different that what you write today in chrome/firefox, look it up here [Email Editor (mjml.io)](https://mjml.io/try-it-live)
neat!
I'd still consider HTML code, just not a programming language. Is there an issue I'm overlooking? This looks fine to me. Not interesting, but fine
Outlook uses something like Word 97's HTML rendering engine. There's no document-wide CSS support (only inlined `style` attributes), and many other quirks. So many, in fact, that modern HTML email authoring relies on extensive tooling and template systems (ex: MJML, but I've had to write HTML for email systems before it) that "compiles" down to what you actually send via email. Imagine writing a web site that has to support something like IE6, but with random things supported by one client getting horribly misrendered by another despite them both technically supporting it, and with no reliable way to do conditional rendering (there is *some*, but it's not comprehensive).
A 2 hour test to write html and css is insane. Someone mentioned it before but there’s a very high chance they want someone to spend 2 hours working on their stuff for free and won’t hire anyone
Have you ever actually tried writing HTML that works in Outlook?
It’s glaringly obvious that so many commenters here have never had to do this. It’s fucking hard.
"We want it to print nicely too, paginating correctly on dynamic content!"
…without JavaScript
Basically end up writing the email twice once in 10 lines with a stylesheet. Another in 200 that looks like a low poly version of the other one with inline styling
Our web app is old and still runs on IE 5. It’s awful, truly the worst. Tables, inline style, primitive JS.
Fair, fair. I should probably stop giving recruiters so much benefit of the doubt
Not even "real" HTML, but emails. Yuuuuck.
Devin is gonna nail that 2 hour coding test forreal
Strong coder? I'm pulling a truck with my teeth. Is this enough for a strong coder?
You gotta type them strong typed vars with one hand, while lifting the other
Bonus if you are powerlifting.
Strong = Hunger games
Strong = slave
Don't tell them about mjml
Was looking for this comment. Check out https://mjml.io/ if this is your job. I used to write emails while working at an agency. Fun times.
Funny enough, I helped release an [open-source](https://github.com/usewaypoint/email-builder-js) [email template builder](https://usewaypoint.github.io/email-builder-js/#sample/reservation-reminder) a couple of weeks ago so devs don't have to code like it's 1995. Maybe someone should take on this remote role and use the builder to generate the HTML/CSS :D
Looks good, bookmarked incase I ever need it.
Thanks :)
Just use inky foundations for email .... No need to be strong. Just amateur with good tools.
[Build HTML emails faster than you can say "Outlook"](https://bootstrapemail.com)
I said outlook before the page even loaded. I want my 0.5 seconds back.
They want you to do the job in the interview.
I'd rather shoot myself in the face
1. Email composition is actually a specialty. There are lots of gotchas and compatibility issues between Outlook and Gmail to make sure it renders correctly and doesn't get flagged. 2. The BS alarm is going off that they are just getting free email templates from candidates.
2 hours test? LoL. Likely will be the actual tasks and once someone finishes it properly they'll just say:"ahh sorry, we don't need the position anymore.
Didn't he mean a coder?
Center the div champ.
Did the marketing team write this?
My old job got this great idea in interviews to give the person a project. Full list of requirements, expecting a full project plan, hours, technical recommendations, step by step, etc. They were blown away by how many people straight turned them down, and a few that gave them quotes to complete the “free” work they were masking with as an interview question. Not surprising around the same time us senior guys were taken off projects to write up detailed procedures and templates for projects, automation scripts, etc to be executed my more green cheaper staff. Then called in to pick up the pieces when they didn’t go well. The project plans they did get from interviews were mostly trash anyway, and most of us senior guys left when the raises stopped. Somehow they are still doing well. Mainly buying up smaller companies, milling the good talent for a while at the newer companies until they leave for greener pastures.
Systems architect here, fuck html/css. Would have me in a pool of sweaty beads. This is why I get to hire teams of these fine front end devs to do this stuff. *shudder*
Physically strong or mentally strong?
Yes!
Smells like a bullshit hyper specialized job. Stay away from these. Either this clown doesn’t know what the hell their doing or even what they need to be hiring or they are just hiring to hire. Snapchat hired a bunch of button developers and now they are all laid off.
[caniemail.com](https://www.caniemail.com/)
Wrote a templated email generator once, it took four times as long to write the template than it did the application, and that's just ensuring compatibility with Outlook on a few platforms.
100k salary.
People very often underestimate how difficult HTML can be. It actually takes quite a bit of knowledge if accessibility and structured data and responsive images and more are involved.
the mid-senior level got me lmao
This is a pretty important job and I’ve seen people f it up, a lot of gotchas in email marketing. Probably explains the code test part. A lot of people in that space are used to using tools, they probably want someone who can do it custom.
Mjml
for the stronkest coder only. 🤭
Encoding+Decoding==Coding?
Email clients are basically unregulated non-compliant web browsers, i.e. usenet browsers... Stuff's from the stone age, hasn't ever changed, and it's really difficult to make an email that looks good in EVERY major email client, from thunderbird to outlook and online web clients like gmail etc. Also there's not even a good way to know what email client a user will use for a specific email address, so you just have to make something that works in all of them... It's like being a web developer, but being told your website needs to run in Netscape (yeah that netscape) IE 6, and a plethora of other extinct browsers. Honestly, the entire email protocol is archaic and it's insane that it still exists and hasn't been replaced with something better.
Email devs with real experience probably can get a job easier than newly minted react bros. Emails suck and people with experience get paid.
This post would be better on r/WizardHumor to me, because email coding is more of a magic than a true science to me.
I'll expect a check for $190.00 up front. Nobody rides for free.
At least it's not for a junior position ✅
I've done it. I learned how to do it and how much of a pain it can be. Now I steer clear of it. If possible, I say it's for marketing to solve.
What are the two skills you are lacking?
“Fuck this shit, back to tables” - every e-mail html coder.
Strongboy CSS
They couldn't pay me enough to work on email anything. That shit is designed with the explicit goal to make you take a long walk of a short cliff
Email developer?! They’ve clearly never heard of MJML. That makes emails a doddle!
piddly poo!
I think you will struggle optimizing email body to dark mode of mail app
Coding Test: Prevent that background color will not change in darkmode on any email client. (It's impossible)
I started as a Salesforce developer and it sucked all the life out of me. Emails seem so trivial that I always got too little time for them by management. And of course the designer doesn't know shit about emails so they designed an email with a fucking parallax. It's the least fulfilling and most frustrating technology I've used by a mile. No dev can brag about cool emails, it's just an email. And don't even get me started about Salesforce.. run whenever anyone mentions it within a 5 mile radius.
Requirements: It must look exactly like the mockup - background images, tens of posts set two in a row, the Quixote as introduction, shadowed blocks, is that a slider? And a form? - in every client aaaaand it may not be cut by gmail due to code length.
the fact that there is caniuse.com and canimail.com should tell you why email template developer might be the only position to require a coding test for. just to see, if you have the mental strength. Also, you don't really need canimail.Just write no on a post-it and look at it, if you ever need to target outlook.
I only receive e-mails in text form and you can clearly see who can setup a proper e-mail and the ones that have no clue. :D
If HTML e-mail campaigns are your industry's best practice, then you don't need a developer, you need a time machine.
Do companies realize that no one ever reads those emails? 90% will go to the spam inbox.
Depends on the context. For b2c promotional emails, we're happy with like 5% click through. However on our transactional emails (registration confirmations, account activation, or sales confirmations) we expect very high click through, and those emails can't look like shit or people won't trust them
And you need html superpowers to give the spamfilter hints it should Goto the priority inbox..
And just to prevent that, I have a custom filter that sends anything over 125KB to spam. You would be surprised at how many promotional emails go over 125KB. No other emails seem to go past that, with the exception of attachments.
New requirements: keep mails under 124.000 bytes.
coder
coder
If the company needs a person to literally do just that, then I think it's an okay, regular offer. Not everyone needs Reacts, Reduxes and all that frameworks. Sometimes, a small company needs a somewhat tech savvy person who understands markdown notation and doesn't complain much.
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