Is it worth a back-end developer's time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS
Encosia: In the ASP.NET community, we catch a lot of flak for the terrible sites that some developers have created with ASP.NET WebForms.  That embarrassment is due exactly to developers choosing to hide behind the (leaky) WebForms abstraction and remain ignorant of the markup that their server-side code produces.  I'd advise against emulating that failure case.If you're working on any code that's within one tier of the HTML/CSS, you should have a basic understanding of the HTML/CSS.That general rule applies to most things.  The more understanding you have of adjacent concerns, the better you will be at your own task.