
The Elephant in the Room: Web design work is drying up - acconrad
http://www.sazzy.co.uk/the-elephant-in-the-room/
======
cjcenizal
I think there's a fundamental shift in the type of web-skills which are now in
demand, due to a number of factors. Here's some things which come to mind:

\- A "web designer" or "web developer" used to be a generalist who wrote HTML,
CSS, and some jQuery. Now there's a demand for specialization: a UI/UX
designer who can prototype, iterate quickly, and use real data if possible,
and a UI/UX engineer who can develop large-scale apps with an eye towards
security, performance, reusability, and maintainability.

\- The need for the generalist web designer/developer seems supplanted by
tools like Squarespace and Bootstrap, which make it easy to get acceptable
results with fewer skills. It's the "commoditization of design".

\- The need for specialized designers/engineers is spurred by a realization
that good design can command a premium/competitive advantage (and that good
design means iterating quickly and having a deep understanding of what makes
fundamentally good UI and UX), and that the front-end benefits from sound
engineering practices as much as the back-end, especially if you're building
SPAs or large-scale apps with complex UXes.

\- A lot of the design problems have been solved already. Questions such as
when modals are appropriate, how to design forms effectively, what makes a
good call-to-action, and how to structure IA effectively have been answered.
Companies no longer need teams of people to work out answers to these
questions, just one or two good leaders to evangelize the answers that are
already established, and a team of UI engineers that can execute them well.

~~~
ryanSrich
> "A lot of the design problems have been solved already. Questions such as
> when modals are appropriate, how to design forms effectively, what makes a
> good call-to-action, and how to structure IA effectively have been answered.
> Companies no longer need teams of people to work out answers to these
> questions, just one or two good leaders to evangelize the answers that are
> already established, and a team of UI engineers that can execute them well."

Perhaps I'm taking this the wrong way, but the tasks you listed there don't
even begin to scratch the surface of existing design problems a UI designer
will face on a daily basis.

EDIT: ex. Consider the design work that went into this product
[http://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive-
computing/watson/watso...](http://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive-
computing/watson/watsonpaths.shtml)

~~~
burgessaccount
It seems to also depend very much on who the website is for. The reality is
that many organizations (small businesses basic organizations restaurants
schools nonprofits etc.) need sites that do basic, routine things, in which
case, the hard problems are solved, and good templates are available. In that
case, having an in-house person who understands the company's needs is better
than having a sophisticated specialist. It seems like, as the # of websites
has increased, one would have expected the demand for web designers to
increase proportionately, but it hasn't, because the orgs with the most
complex site needs were the first to build.

~~~
ryanSrich
Website is also a minomer now more than ever. If it's online and you access it
via the web is it a website? A product? A web product? A web app? SaaS app? Is
it mobile? Is a webkit app a website? Is a website wrapped in a mobile browser
ported to a phone a website?

One could certainly argue in either direction for all of those questions. The
skills are all very similar, the technologies are mostly the same
(foundationally).

I don't think work is drying up nor demand going down. I think designers are
more important now more than ever, they just might not be traditional web
designers.

------
josefresco
One of the problems here is that the author is using his/her experience at
"conferences" and stories from former "big business" employees to judge the
volume of available work.

Not only is that evidence anecdotal, but also comes from a very
specific/narrow audience. I'm not going to say "conference goers" are inferior
or bad at their jobs, just that there's a whole lot of web designers and
developers who never attend conferences and therefore aren't included in his
polling. There's also a lot of us (myself included) doing a lot of web design
work for small businesses too small to hire in house. Even when our clients
hire someone in-house to _handle_ the web, it results in more work for us.

~~~
sarahparmenter
I'm not just using my evidence of anecdotal "conference goers" I have 6 months
worth of email to back it up as well. Non-conference goers. People who are
just trying to make a living and wondering why they can't.

~~~
pjlegato
They can't make a living because Wix, Squarespace, Facebook pages, and Amazon
shops are now considered "good enough" by most of the middle market (small and
medium businesses), so there is not much need now for custom work in that
segment.

This was not the case even 5 years ago. The tools are now out there to make a
reasonable-looking website with minimal training or experience. Sure, it looks
very much like the other sites made with that tool, but (apparently) most
businesses don't care.

Custom web dev will continue to exist only at the low and high ends --
hobbyist websites made by people who enjoy the process, and a few large,
complex specialist sites.

~~~
JimDabell
> This was not the case even 5 years ago.

People were saying exactly the same thing in relation to FrontPage 20 years
ago. After that it was Dreamweaver. WordPress. Wix. etc.

The tools for people to go off and do it themselves have been with us for a
very long time, and they've only ever squeezed out the very bottom of the
market. The types of organisations that DIY appeals to aren't in the market
and don't have the budget for an average developer, and the organisations that
spend money on developers wouldn't consider DIY.

~~~
jonesb6
But the tools, and the marketing of those tools, have vastly improved in the
last ~5 years. Or are you telling me dreamweaver's wysiwyg editor was the
pinnacle of development..

~~~
JimDabell
Yes, the tools have vastly improved over the past five years – but the whole
industry has. The tools a freelancer uses have improved dramatically as well.
What a freelancer can achieve in a given amount of time has improved
dramatically too. And clients' expectations are growing correspondingly.

The whole industry is moving forward. The bottom of the freelance market 20
years ago was plain static pages and that's what FrontPage competed with. The
bottom of the freelance market now is a content-managed dynamic site and
that's what Facebook pages compete with.

~~~
jonesb6
You just made my point. Not all freelancers choose to improve their tool-set.
Therefore they fall behind where, like you said, the whole industry moves
forward.

~~~
JimDabell
If all you are arguing is that people who don't make any effort to improve
their work will struggle to keep up with the rest of the industry, then yes, I
agree with that. But that doesn't seem to have been your point until now.

~~~
jonesb6
Fair point, I probably jumped the gun with that statement.

------
Daishiman
No shit. Bottom-tier design work was necessary when the default templates for
everything were crap and people were ignorant of the technology.

Also, a lot of "designers" and "design agencies" can't code HTML worth crap
and the value they provided was minimal.

To me, a good independent designer codes, knows quirks, and also has the eye
for design. If you're a larger company and you want the specialists, it's just
better to hire them. And if you don't understand the importance of design,
there's an unlimited amount of cheap, quality templates out there.

The trivial work for Photoshoppers with a design degree is up.

~~~
Neputys
I'd add one more thing - if you look at it closer, web designers never tried
or managed to be properly original and diverse. There was always some sort of
"magical guidelines" that made everything look in essence the same. Everyone
was/is copying everyone else and getting paid for it. I think this has to end
sooner or later and template popularity is one of the signs that real value of
things is being better recognized.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> Everyone was/is copying everyone else and getting paid for it.

Isn't that just a mixture of technical limitations and fashion.

~~~
Neputys
Technical, financial, organisational, etc. yes, but almost the whole point of
creativity is being able to come up with something original, new. If you don't
you don't get paid or in this case you don't get paid for long. That's just
how things work. I personally find it very sad, that a huge amount of
(willing!!!) copy cats call them selves creatives and then somebody calls the
whole misguided charade fashion.

edit: just in case - I hope this doesn't offend you, somebody=everybody, I
didn't mean anything personal

~~~
prawn
I think you're underestimating how many creative projects done for clients are
very much led by something they've seen before. "Make it like the Tesla site.
I love the Tesla site!" At some budget ranges, it's not worth the time to
fight that.

And beyond fashion, user expectations are a massive influence. People are wary
of right-side navigation, designers know that top-left is the common spot for
branding for a reason, etc. There are very practical usability and design
reasons that things get pushed down a fixed number of creative paths.

~~~
Neputys
As I've said, there are legit reasons, but my point was that they are being
abused too often and this will have consequences.

------
kaishiro
I find this fascinating actually. Just the other day I ended up talking about
this with my lawyer. I met with him for a consult on some LLC/Corp setup and
mentioned how I had originally ended up on LegalZoom before contacting him. I
said something to the effect of "You must hate them".

He thought about it for a minute and then said how he honestly didn't think
about them much at all. It was a completely different industry as far as he
was concerned. He was in the business of offering problems to solutions
whereas LegalZoom was offering a product.

Whether you agree with that or not (I'm not qualified enough to make that
distinction in the legal field), it really resonated with me. If you were to
ask me if - as a freelance developer - I hated Wix or Squarespace, my response
would be that I honestly don't think about them much at all. I'm actually
largely ambivalent about them. I freelance full time and I've never been
busier than I am right now. I would chalk some of that up to dumb luck, most
of that up to good referrals, but at least a portion of that up to the fact
that I don't provide a product for a client. I (try) to provide solutions to
their business problems.

~~~
ddlatham
_He was in the business of offering problems to solutions_

Yup, sounds like some lawyers I talk to.

------
xhrpost
Am I missing something? My employer is having a hard time filling a single
developer position. We have 100 million people within a 10 hour drive and
we've posted to HN and SO. We're not an elite startup paying tons of money
with stock options, but if there is no work like the author says, it shouldn't
be that hard. I have recruiters messaging me about jobs thousands of miles
away. I talk to other developers in the area and they confirm the same
problem.

I like the audio feature here by the way, I can listen while working, pretty
awesome.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Startups have a hard time hiring because they'll only hire ~28 year old
white/Asian males with a carefully selected group of 20 resume buzzwords, that
can code on a whiteboard with a gun to their head. Not surprisingly that niche
is tapped.

~~~
illicium
Oddly enough, working at a startup is pretty similar to coding on a whiteboard
with a gun to your head :)

~~~
EC1
I'll take the gun please.

~~~
toxican
Dibs on the whiteboard!

------
dredmorbius
I followed the link to the article to read it.

And then I did what I usually do these days: I hit the "Reader Mode" icon on
my Firefox (Android) browser. I do the same for most desktop sites as well.

Why?

Font too small. Contrast too low. Line lengths too long.

I get _a better_ , and far more importantly, _uniform_ experience _when I bin
all Web design and go with a built-in default page presentation mode._

Oh, and that _on a Web designer 's own blog._

Where, I presume, she doesn't have the problem of getting idiotic client
requests which violate numerous sane design concepts.

I've been saying this for some years now: Web design isn't the solution, _Web
design is the problem_.

It's going to be solved, _is_ being solved, _in the browser_ , by:

1\. Stripping out extraneous crud. I haven't mentioned my all-but-blind
friend's difficulties in navigating anything on a computer, but extraneous
crud and Shit That Randomly Changes (even the Firefox card previews on his
browser start page) are huge hurdles.

2\. Uniform presentation.

3\. Metadata.

4\. Curation.

There was a post on HN recently about ePub. Quite frankly, an ePub based
browsing / curation tool with uniform, sane, presentation would replace about
99.99964% of my Web browsing needs. There are a small number of missing
factors from HTML, largely footnotes, equations support, and hierarchical
comments/follow-ups. But add those and we can ditch the entire current mess
for 1) ePub articles and 2) Web-deployed apps for the very small handful of
sites which honestly need them.

~~~
zaroth
#575757 text on a 'white' background, font-size 17px... "Reader Mode" is
great, but hardly a requirement in this case.

~~~
dredmorbius
I find #333 problematic -- it seems fuzzy usually, though #330 typically
isn't. Hard to beat #000/#fff.

Pixels vary tremendously in size. Other than as a compatibility mode, I'd
ditch them entirely. html { font-size: medium; } will give the user their
default choices, which works quite well for those who know what they're doing,
and can be trivially fixed by those who don't.

A basic style that's foundation for much of what I do:
[http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB](http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB)

------
sp332
Freelance worked before because companies needed smallish jobs done here and
there. Now they need a full-time team. Shouldn't that be better for the web
designers? They don't have to be on a treadmill looking for leads all the
time. They can settle in and work at one company with a high level of job
security. And probably they'd have much more clout in terms of how things are
done in the companies, driving bigger changes and potentially earning a lot
more.

~~~
BjoernKW
Not necessarily. Depends on what your goals are. I'm a freelance IT consultant
and I love it, especially the part about about finding leads and working for
many different clients on new and interesting challenges.

If freelance work dried up in my segment, I'd look for other entrepreneurial
opportunities, which could very well mean not working in software development
or IT anymore, but I certainly wouldn't settle for working as an employee. It
just isn't for me.

Besides, the high level of job security is a fallacy. As an employee you're
working for only one client: Your employer. If that employer suddenly decides
you're redundant you're out of a steady income at once with no other clients
or leads to compensate for that.

You can't exactly always be on the lookout for another position while on a job
because your current employer will get suspicious and ask you what you think
you're doing. For an entrepreneur always to be looking for new leads is the
default mode so losing a deal - while unfortunate - isn't an end-of-the-line
scenario in most cases.

~~~
saiya-jin
had the same thinking when consulting few years ago... but every scenario is
different, everybody has different expectations and all this change as we age.
You are right there is no job security in perm job, but there are some true
benefits.

I have 25 fully paid MDs per year, another 9 public holiday ones, 2 weeks of
fully paid sick days. I can have a month with few MDs of work done and still
get full salary. While consulting, when thinking about vacation, by far the
biggest costs were not of actual vacation, but time lost not consulting. Which
made the price explode 4-5x and effectively prevented me to have much better
life.

I might get back later, for a while, but realistically, it ain't worth it.
This might be different in other locations, where consulting vs perm job
difference is much bigger, but here, taken all into account is less than 10%.

------
alexashka
What I find interesting is the call to action at the end:

"Our power has always been in our web community – we are exceptionally good at
creating movements and solving things, as a community. It’s time to dig deep
and put as much time and effort into helping our community as we once did
fixing browser quirks all those years ago."

I think this is a common wishful thinking comment from people who don't
understand how the world works. How is the 'community' of web designers going
to do anything about companies wanting in-house staff or squarespace making
week-long wordpress projects obsolete?

Bottom line is: most people don't need a website. Squarespace covers a great
deal of what very small websites need and frankly - a facebook page is good
enough for most things.

Why have a website at all?

I don't know if selling t-shirts is a solved problem in web dev because I'm
not in the loop but that seems to me - the last frontier, once you can sell
t-shirts and other variety of items without needing much technical know-how,
the game is over.

I am glad it's over - who needs a billion bloated wordpress sites? I want
everything online sold through amazon, events posted on facebook and news
posted to a single platform (I use an RSS reader which makes dozens of
websites look exactly the same).

We don't need much web design, 100 different types of cars or 100 different
shampoos, wake up, it's madness :)

~~~
pjlegato
Mistaking the order of this causality is a common error. The community of
people developed secondarily to an overarching economic process -- money being
spent to build websites. Now, Wix and Squarespace and Facebook are "good
enough," so that huge middle market market doesn't exist anymore.

They imagine that it was the other way around, that the economic process is
secondary to the community, that the community _created_ the economic process
of web development, and can now control the economics of that.

This is backwards. The web dev community only ever existed because there was a
large and distributed economic need for lots of custom websites. Now that
there is no economic motivation -- no outside money flowing into that
community -- the community cannot sustain itself, except in greatly reduced
form among a few hobbyists and high-end specialists.

You might compare it to the community of horse saddle manufacturers. It was a
huge industry 150 years ago. Today, only a few hobbyist and specialist shops
still make saddles, because there is not much economic need for them now as
compared to the previous period. It wouldn't have made any difference if all
horse saddle manufacturers organized their community in 1910 or so -- most of
them would still have gone out of business anyway, because cars took over the
economic niche that drove their industry. They were disrupted, in startup-
speak.

No amount of wishful thinking or movement-building on the part of the
community can change the underlying economics. The broad middle market for
custom websites simply no longer exists. The best way to help the community of
middle market web developers is to help each other retrain on other skillsets.

~~~
tajen
Between VPs trying to predict the unicorn bubble burst, the end of half of
Yahoo, and the fall of the website design market, they're starting to convince
me that a lot of developers will soon be on the market and the crisis is back.
Now, I'm an entrepreneur, is it a good time to hire ;)

~~~
knieveltech
Sounds like you misspelled vulture. I say that knowing the downvotes are
seconds away.

~~~
rjknight
He just suggested that now is a good time to give jobs to people who are
losing them as a result of market conditions beyond his control. That is a
strange definition of 'vulture'.

~~~
knieveltech
I read the statement differently. The implication I picked up on is demand is
slacking off so now's a good time to hire developers for reduced wages. I may
have brought some baggage to the table.

------
michaelbuckbee
There has been one really significant general ecosystem change in the "web
design" space: much higher quality HTML themes.

I think these have just obliterated the low end of the market as for $50 and a
little developer elbow grease you can have a very professional looking site.

These are displacing web design jobs that would otherwise be in the $3k to
$15k range and often times are better quality (tons of built in templates for
different page types, retina ready, responsive, etc.) and no need for PSD2HTML
work.

~~~
charlesdm
Some of the people who sell a $50 theme have made millions from them. So
overall for those willing to take a risk, things are actually better than
before.

------
Bjorkbat
Honestly, I'm pretty okay with this.

The city where I live (which I imagine is indicative of other cities as well)
the local population of freelancers and small studios forms a pyramid.

The top half of the pyramid is made up of really phenomenal freelancers and
small teams. Individually, they have pretty cool industry experience and have
learned a lot from their careers, to the point where they have the negotiating
power to operate as a well-payed contractor. As for the small studios, if they
really wanted to they could use their in-house skills to create really amazing
products and make money that way, but the personalities of the people who work
there are more aligned with work where they can work on a multitude of
exciting things at any different time.

The bottom half of the pyramid has some people who are in a transitional
state, who will eventually move to the top half, but it's mostly made of a lot
of mediocre generalists. They saw that a lot of businesses just wanted a damn
website, they figured out they could make that damn website, they figured out
they could potentially make a lot of money this way, so they learned the
basics of the LAMP stack, learned how to use Wordpress, and threw themselves
into a crowded ring.

To be fair, I've met a few of the bottom-halfers, and they seem like alright
guys, but talking shop with them is pretty awful. They're not really life-long
learners, or they have this unbalanced focus towards business and marketing
with the idea that they can communicate the value of what they can do better,
but not really looking into actually delivering more value through better
skills.

To sum it up, the top-halfers move with the changing market, the bottom-
halfers just sort of sit there and wonder why more small businesses don't want
custom Wordpress sites.

I realize this can seem callous and harsh, but at the same time I've also seen
the bottom half of the pyramid screw over small businesses on the regular. The
don't explicitly brag about it, but they kinda do on an implicit level, and
it's sad for the small business and it's sad that the person bragging has this
weird sense of value exchange.

Besides that, it's not like life ends of these freelancers either. So long as
they're humble about the fact that they need to learn new skills, they can
probably use their experience to get a pretty great job. It probably won't pay
as much, but it's still going to pay pretty well. If they can't accept this,
then I don't know if I can sympathize.

~~~
pekk
Sometimes I wonder if anyone has ever posted to HN not believing they are in
the top 50%, 10%, or 1%. It's like how everyone's kid is above average. The
topic of how everyone else sucks seems to be evergreen.

Everyone's just trying to get by. If someone gets less work, that isn't reason
to think that they have poor skills, or are screwing over small businesses.

~~~
Bjorkbat
That's why I made sure to include that there are people in the bottom half of
that pyramid who I think will get to the top half, because eventually I
believe they'll move either to the top half of the pyramid, or outside of the
pyramid altogether.

But I stand firm in my belief that a lot of the people who are firmly planted
there have poor skills or they're delivering far less value than what could be
gotten through, say, Squarespace.

~~~
sandmansandine
I agree with this, I've seen a lot of "custom" sites done for small businesses
which, in the end, looked worse than setting up a Squarespace site with a some
pretty photos.

The custom sites took tons of time, lots of client back and forth, and in the
end probably weren't as well optimized as a Squarespace site. A great designer
can definitely do some amazing things, but a lot of people in the lower half
should just focus on sending out some Squarespace promo codes, at least they
can get some free hosting that way.

------
rwhitman
I came to this realization a few months ago that I had been riding for several
years on the wave of retrofitting and then migrating the desktop-focused web
to mobile devices.

Once every business with deep pockets in my circle had sufficiently mobile-
optimized their website, my services were becoming less and less urgent.

I've been freelancing / consulting for 15 years, so having to re-skill or
market myself differently is a periodic necessity. But generally I'm
accustomed to making moves into other web-related areas.

There's a new reality evolving that I'm not accustomed to dealing with. No
growth in investment, no new bleeding-edge tech or hip design trend to sell to
clients. The people who need web talent every day already have them in-house
by now. The ones who don't, hook together SAAS products to get what they need
done.

I've become very skilled at hooking together SAAS products for online
marketing use cases, but the more I do it the more I realize I'm slowing
chipping away my clients' need for hiring designers / developers.

The market is becoming increasingly saturated with competing talent, a lot of
whom were sold General Assembly type training as an easy solution to low
employment prospects, on top of experienced folks who are scratching their
heads over the stagnation like I am.

Really thinking it might even be time to jump ship into another business
altogether. I feel bad for all the folks who are entering the market right
now, must be so disappointing

------
learc83
Web design work hasn't really dried up, they just call themselves UI/UX
designers now. And they work on designing and prototyping applications instead
of building brochureware sites for small businesses. The skills required are a
bit different because technology has changed.

Web designers are like photographers. Camera technology advanced so that
anyone can now be a mediocre photographer, just like anyone can now be a
mediocre web designer. Until recently the technology (for both photographers
and web designers) was difficult enough to use, that just knowing how to use
it was a valuable skill.

But, software is still eating the world, and it won't be done doing that for
long while. All that software still needs people who are experts in human
machine interaction--UI/UX designers.

On another note, I think that companies having easier access to VC money may
have encouraged some of them to hire full time designers where they used to
use short term contractors.

------
strommen
A major trend in the past few years has been an increasing focus on conversion
optimization. Companies no longer care quite so much about their website being
beautiful; they care about whether it's helping their business.

Indeed that's what they have always wanted - but 5 years ago they didn't
realize they could measure that directly, and aesthetics seemed like the best
proxy.

I, for one, blame patio11.

~~~
rstupek
I'm not sure people don't care about aesthetics. Every website I've seen is
one massive image with infinite scroll. I don't think that yields the best
conversion optimization but maybe that's just me

~~~
ktRolster

      > very website I've seen is one massive image with
      > infinite scroll. I don't think that yields the 
      > best conversion optimization
    

I've wondered that a lot, looking at some company's website, barely
understanding what the product is, and asking myself, "Have they ever made a
single sale or generated a single lead based on this website? What exactly is
the purpose of this website?"

------
colmvp
One web design agency I used to work for in the U.S. has exploded in growth.
When I first started, they were a few dozen people. Now they have hundreds of
employees and offices around the world.

Many of these employees left to start their own web design agency and all have
again, grown in size and worked on very notable design projects.

While sites like Squarespace has made it easier for small and independent
businesses to develop sites, medium to large businesses still don't mind going
to agencies or firms. Agencies have the capacity to do other things like do
professional photo shoots, influence branding, and give strategic consultation
that DIY simply doesn't allow.

I do think there is an evolution to the web design position. Now, on top of
understanding aesthetics, designers need to know how to prototype, code
(basics), interpret and apply human research.

------
RawInfoSec
I think there's actually more web sites being built than ever, and that the
problem is that company's expect more for less.

The WordPress pollution has brought about a revolution in pricing within our
field. Companies actually expect full e-commerce for under $1k because they've
been spoiled with these easy-peasy systems that can be slapped together in no
time at all.

How do I market a team of high end devs, engineers and security consultans to
develop a company web presence which Joe Nobody is offering them for $599?
Here lies the elephant. Not the folks turning quick bucks at our expense, but
the mere fact that it's darned near impossible to convince clients to spend
wisely.

There are still companies who know better, but in a world where everyone wants
to be a 'startup', it's becoming less and less.

------
dantiberian
As an independent consultant/software developer, I'm deeply sympathetic to the
author and freelance web communities issues. However it seems like the issue
here is not that web design work is drying up, it's that web design work _for
freelancers_ is drying up. If all of the companies that used to contract out
to freelancers now want permanent employees, then that's probably where you're
going to need to go.

------
jackgavigan
In the early days of the web, web designer used to earn as much as £800 per
day (~$1200 at the time) for handcrafting HTML in vi or Notepad, doing a bit
of image manipulation in Paint Shop Pro.

Then Hotmetal Pro came along and we all had up learn the Dark Art of CGI
scripting to maintain the daily rates. Then Cold Fusion took over, et cetera,
et cetera.

Skills are constantly rendered redundant by technology and/or commoditised
because they get taught in mainstream education.

You have to keep upgrading your skills.

~~~
stray
I'm pretty sure there are people with driving licenses who weren't born the
last time I heard HoTMetaL mentioned.

~~~
jackgavigan
I'm pretty sure there are people with _children_ who weren't born the last
time I heard HoTmEtAl mentioned...

------
alkonaut
Really what he's saying isn't that web design work is drying up, it's that
_freelance_ or _external contractor_ web design work is drying up because more
work is being done in house. That doesn't sound like its bad in any way.

> put as much time and effort into helping our community

What is this community? The community of web designers? Aren't the in-house
web designers at Toyota or Google still part of this same community?

------
tomc1985
This is a byproduct of the massive increase in tooling that we've seen over
the past few years. Granted tooling has always advanced incredibly quickly but
I do feel that somewhere in the 2014-2016 time period we hit an inflection
point.

~~~
blammail
This is definitely a factor. Its never been easier to do web design with many
excellent tools. Similar thing has happened in game development (i.e. unity,
et.al) - technology is bringing the expertise required lower.

~~~
id
Similarly high-skilled and specialized people will always be in demand.

------
pbnjay
There's a lot more competition externally too, which doesn't help any.
Everyone with a computer and "an eye for it" has entered the market and
underbids the experienced players. Similar things are happening in Photography
where everyone buys a nice DSLR and then thinks they can do weddings.

When the new freelancers realize they aren't cut out for it, they just take a
job at a bigco again (filling the same role of course), and new inexperienced
freelancers come up the ranks to replace them.

This seems to be the new world we live in - the "gig economy" means there are
a lot of gigs but a lot more competition from less-experienced players.

~~~
Grazester
Surprisingly on my little Caribbean island a lot more people are picking up
DSLR's and shooting wedding very well. My jaw dropped to see some of their
work...then again they seem to really take this thing a lot more seriously
than I did. I have an acquaintance that flies into the US to do work for
clients there.

~~~
ghaff
It's another example of the hollowed out middle that was mentioned upthread.
It's much easier than it used to be for someone with a modicum of talent and
interest to take an SLR and produce competent photos of weddings and events--
and to set themselves up online to run a small weekend side business.

Some will be better than others certainly. And we can probably stipulate that
most won't be as good as someone who does this as a full-time profession. But,
guess what. They're in a position to earn some extra spending money on
weekends while undercutting anyone who has to make a living at it. And many
will produce results that are quite competent. Competence at a relatively low
price is good value for a lot of young couples without much money. (I shot a
couple weddings myself when I was in school--back in the film days.)

Then on the other end you've got photographers with distinctive styles who
deliver something special. They'll often be in great demand and command large
premiums.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Thing is, a lot of professional photographers were truly lacking either talent
or clue.

They'd have a studio - a room with lights and a handful of backgrounds - in a
town or village somewhere, and they'd get most of the portrait, wedding, and
yearbook work for an area. Sometimes they'd get work from a local paper.

But their output was average at best. They got work because they spent money
on equipment, and they had enough basic competence to use it without making
really obvious mistakes. But that was literally all they offered.

>And many will produce results that are quite competent.

Which is the core of the issue: it turns out that the basic creative skill
level of much of the population is much higher than anyone realised.

There's still a huge gap between dabblers and geniuses. But if you make
professional equipment cheap and easy to use, you'll find that a lot of people
can produce results that used to be considered professional.

This is true of photography, music, video, and digital art - and now it's
becoming true of programming.

In a way this is a good thing. But it means real experts with truly
outstanding skills are going to find it harder to find a niche that pays well
- just as many outstanding musicians, photographers, and video makers are
struggling because the market for innovative and slightly difficult work is
smaller than it used to be.

Web design + programming are going the same way.

Industrial web dev - giant systems that work at scale and which deal with huge
data sets - is still valuable for now.

But small-scale freelance web dev is losing to automation and simplified
design tools.

It's not the same as the photography/creative market, because the big
industrial conglomerates still want talent, and so do start-ups that hope to
become big industrial conglomerates.

But that basic level of mom 'n pop boutique "agency" design is going to die
off completely within 5-10 years.

~~~
ghaff
It's probably also true that the "geniuses" historically did a lot of pretty
constrained rote work in photography to pay the bills. To the degree that work
goes away, it becomes harder to fund the truly creative work.

------
duren
I've done a bit of freelance web design and development over the past few
years, but recently I've found myself referring more and more people to
services like Squarespace and Shopify. As potential clients are given more
options – especially cheaper ones – of course the industry is going to become
more competitive.

~~~
sarahparmenter
They're good options too. I use Squarespace for one of my businesses because
it needs to be updated by non-web-savvy people and it was the easiest route
for that particular business.

~~~
ghaff
Squarespace seems to have really carved out a nice little niche for
themselves. They've also really gone all in on podcast advertising. I'd be
curious if/why there is some particular audience for podcasts that
particularly aligns with Squarespace's product.

~~~
thirdsun
I hear their ads constantly on This American Life, Radiolab, Serial....or
simply high quality general interest podcasts covering a wide range of
subjects. I'm just guessing here, but I imagine the typical audience might be
people that are educated, interested, curious, with good taste, somewhat close
to the pulse of time, without necessarily falling into hipster territory,
...and not afraid of trying to build a website on their own (I'm guessing
that's how they see using Squarespace), whether for their small business or
their personal blog for niche interests.

Sure, a very general and possibly very wrong assumption on my part, but I
think it makes sense to target those listeners.

------
LandoCalrissian
Not really a shock, evolve or die. I did a great deal of web design in my
earlier years, but you have to keep up. I learned how to code, I learned
databases, I learned system administration, learned the latest frameworks, I
made sure I kept up my skill set.

I ended up in UI/UX, but since it's such a young field the variance in quality
is completely crazy. You will get people that are 100% designers that have no
concept of what is required to implement their ideas, on the other hand you
get middling coders that know nothing about design. It's pretty interesting to
see.

It was pretty clear where it was going 5-6 years ago. It's too easy to make a
simple restaurant website, you have to bring far more to the table these days.

------
xutopia
Jobs get folded into other jobs all the time in the tech sector. Does anyone
remember webmasters? They're the ones who would configure the web servers and
host the files for you, set you up with FTP credentials etc... Now devops
people fill the bill and so do most web developers I know but it's just a
subset of what they do.

------
mtbcoder
I'm late to the conversation here, but I think the real elephant in the room
is the short shelf life of the average independent
contractor/freelancer/consultant. Unfortunately, and all too often on this
site, the meme of the happy-go-lucky, working-on-a-beach independent
contractor is paraded out and extolled as some wondrous opportunity that will
net your average "web developer" enough riches and leisure time to live the
dream lifestyle. In reality, this couldn't be further from the truth. Being an
independent contractor means you are a business, full stop. You are the CEO,
the marketer, the HR department and the worker. Like any other business, a few
will make it, but most will fizzle out, go bankrupt or be replaced by ruthless
competitors. Unless you are able to find and acquire those in-demand, niche
skill sets or product offerings (of which "web design" and/or "web
development" are no longer in this set), your business will suffer a
significantly short shelf life, just as any other business.

------
adnrw
I think that like in most industries, the low-end has become commoditised.

Want to sell stuff online? It used to cost thousands of dollars to get an
online store up and running.

Now you can sign up to Shopify and start selling your stuff the same day using
a theme that, to be honest, is more than good enough for what it costs.

The same goes for brochure sites, a space now filled by Squarespace and Wix
and so on. Cheap or free options have always been around, but now you can get
a theme that is more than good enough.

But that's great for web designers, right? Anyone wanting to only pay
$25/month for that kind of product is going to be a terrible client for anyone
trying to make a proper living in the space.

Work for web designers isn't drying up overall, it's just that the low-end –
the work we didn't want to really do anyway – has become commoditised.

The higher-end work – the more challenging problems to solve, the ones that
need proper design thinking to solve – is still around, and it's become much
more specialised.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Work for web designers isn't drying up overall, it's just that the low-end –
[...] – has become commoditised.

>The higher-end work – [...] – is still around, and it's become much more
specialised

The specialisation means that work for "web designers" has declined IMO.

I used to do sites for local charities and SMEs. They tend now to use Wix or
WordPress with a template, something along those lines.

Those who can afford something more bespoke have much greater expectations and
web design as a field has grown. Just keeping up with the pace of change of
browser tech is hard now, never mind everything else that goes in to a
"simple" webpage - one needs a team to do it properly IMO. So the generalists,
as I once was, are really not in demand anymore.

The web designer has been killed off by commoditisation and specialisation and
there increased expectation and possibilities that are now part of the
everyday web.

~~~
adnrw
> The specialisation means that work for "web designers" has declined IMO.

Yep, exactly. There isn't really such thing as a "web designer" anymore (or
rather, there isn't going to be). The job has been split into several
different specialised roles.

It's no longer enough to just be able to design and build a good website,
because that level of service has become commoditised.

------
odonnellryan
I don't think this is true at all. There's a million new jobs online every
day.

There are a few problems I've realized about the industry:

1) Far too many clients are going with talent that will leave them in a bad
place in the project. Usually this is to save a few thousand dollars now: a
very modest $5,000 proposal gets shot down for "someone that can do it for a
few hundred dollars."

2) Good clients, really good clients, are hard to find. This is because
they're probably working with good developers. All the amazing clients I've
found have been because their current dev is not able to handle the work for
whatever reason and I got lucky to pick them up.

The business is there, but it's repeat business. Stop looking for one-off
work. Start building real relationships with your clients.

------
ypeterholmes
The issue here boils down to process. Turn-key solutions like Wix have sprung
up to cater the low hanging fruit. For everything else, the diversification of
our digital lives across web and mobile devices have forced new interactive
constraints on the traditional graphic design process, meaning its print media
process foundations are no longer workable. Rather, the modern design process
has to be much more agile and interactive than a flat design file can allow.
The result is that we now have programmers trying to design, and designers
trying to program.

But it's a short term problem, because design software with interactive and
adaptive tools are being constructed to help designers accommodate the new
constraints and allow them back into the process.

------
ideonexus
> _On the stage, a very adept and confident speaker jokingly mentioned a web-
> related joke that feels decades old (which she was sarcastically referring
> to as being decades old) and the whole room fell about laughing; it was the
> first time they had heard this reference._

It's really killing me to not know what the joke being referenced is. Never
before have I so desperately wanted an author to "Show, don't tell."

> _We used to have to sell the benefits of being online to our clients._

I remember when it was like this. In 1999 I was trying to drum up business for
a web-development startup, going business-to-business offering cheap packages
to get online. I got laughed out of a lot of shops and offices before I
finally couldn't take the rejection anymore.

> _It didn’t seem to matter who I spoke to last year, similar stories of
> hiring internally rather than using external agencies /freelancers, cropped
> up – and thus, a significant new breed of web designer was born. Companies
> who would have once used small studios or freelancers to complete their
> projects, no longer had a need to use them and work started to dry up for
> people who had relied on the abundant freelance lifestyle that was once
> afforded to them._

I think the author is making a mistake in focusing on this one reason for
freelance web development work drying up. Large companies who need dedicated
constantly-updated websites moved in-house, but the reality is that it doesn't
take as much skill to setup a robust website anymore. My sister is a graphics
designer with zero technical skills, she makes her freelance money with one-
click wordpress installs and lets the customers manage their own sites.

Then there's the next generation of kids who are simply naturals at this
stuff. They don't know how to code, but there are so many WYSIWYG applications
out there to build what they want, they don't need to do any coding. Even my
75-year-old mother setup and administers a wordpress blog for her students.

Our skills made us special as innovators 10-20 years ago, but many of us are
no longer cutting edge. Maybe some of these freelancers should look at
becoming the in-house code-monkey for one of these larger companies if they
are really hard-up for work.

~~~
sarahparmenter
Sorry to have frustrated you. The joke was
[http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/](http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/)

~~~
patmcc
I really wish that looked different in Chrome vs Firefox vs Safari.

~~~
TylerH
Agreed. It misses out on the most obvious opportunity by not doing this.

------
zhte415
This is a bit meta, or not, as this is about web design.

I love the audio feature, where she reads her article. And the presentation of
it - i.e. how long it takes to listen to.

Nice style. Very Lucy Kellaway, infact.

~~~
DomreiRoam
I like it a lot. As a non native speaker I liked to ear how to pronounce the
words.

------
dwd
All things have cycles. While you could argue Wix, Weekly and Squarespace are
taking market share - there has always been that low end. Anyone remember
Geocities?

Envato is also taking a certain market though they are often the tire kickers
who think they can do it themselves. You see a few of those who get so far but
can't finish it. The instant their content doesn't match the length of the
default content it starts to look bad or the template displays 4 key services,
they have 5. What I find infuriating is the freelancers (or displaced
marketing people) who just sell templates and even their own site is just an
off-the-shelf template. The SEO space is similarly flooded with marketing
people who can run SEMRush to get a report and spam your client base daily
with long tail keyword suggestions they could get them ranking number one for.

There is a new type of customer who want something custom and vehemently don't
what a template as well.

The big thing is mobile compatibility is still hard and hosting/security is
hard. New browsers break stuff and many corporate clients still need it to
look passable on XP. Customer Service is key and building a loyal customer
base who you look after, will weather you through any slight change in the
market.

~~~
fredleblanc
Good points all around. As a small web shop, and I'm currently overflowingly
busy, as I have been for the last few years. It's probably partially luck, but
I'd like to think that there a certain value that I, as a web person, brings
to the table that makes it worthwhile for my clients.

And let's not forget that while everyone may not want a custom design for
their sites, there are a lot of people out there that don't want to maintain
their own sites, and would rather pay someone else to do so. When that
happens, what's the difference between building something custom vs. WordPress
and a nice theme vs. SquareSpace and their offerings? The value isn't the
deliverable as much as it's the comfort in knowing your web stuff is taken
care of and you don't have to deal with it.

I suppose at that point you're not talking about "web design" per se, but a
"small web business." But I'm OK with that. Additionally, there is still room
with those options to provide value more than just set-up and maintain.
Writing good content and creating good IA is still a challenge for all of
those products. To me, all of these things are part of being a small web shop,
and from what I can see are things that won't be going away or automated any
time soon.

Although the once automated, we'll essentially have robots (creating content)
fighting robots (search engine spiders), which I think is something we can all
agree on as being fun to watch with a drink in hand.

------
jonesb6
A) the bar is being raised B) the bar is being raised particularly high where
you are looking for work

PHP, Jquery, etc. won't get you as far as it used to in the Bay Area. But as
an exercise look for job openings in the mid-west or north-west, and they're
looking for... PHP, Jquery, (ASP.net), etc.

Markets move.. including the market for tech skills. You either move with the
market or move markets. You shouldn't ever expect it to last forever.

------
nfriedly
Having spent several years freelancing and now on my second stint as an
employee, I have to say: giving up freelancing and becoming an employee is not
the end of the world.

Sure you don't work with as wide of a variety of people and projects, but it
_is_ still possible to work from home and have a fair amount of autonomy. Plus
you can get paid vacation, sane hours, and reliable pay. It's also generally
less stressful.

------
ryanSrich
It's all about positioning. The term "web designer" and "web developer" feels
dated. If you have those skills you might consider rebranding yourself as a
UI/UX Designer, a Product Designer or a Visual Designer. If you're good at
JavaScript you could rebrand as a JavaScript Engineer, UI Engineer, or
Frontend Developer.

I think what it boils down to is that companies just want 1-5 in house
designers to do the work that they typically outsourced in the past. If your
product is particularly complex that number will grow (with scale as well of
course).

It's also worth noting that designers in the tech industry have, for better or
worse, absorbed much of the tasks typically assigned to a frontend or web
developer. Regardless of the prefix, if you're a designer you'll need solid
HTMl/CSS/JS skills.

Lastly. If you're looking for the freedom of freelance with the security of a
full-time job I can't recommend remote work enough.

------
datashovel
This reminds me. I've been wanting to ask (In fact I'm about to post a "Ask
HN" about this in case anyone wants to have a discussion about it).

Similar to "Who is hiring", I am wondering if a monthly "Who is networking"
would be a good idea. Or does something like this already happen here?

I'm thinking in terms of skilled people who are looking for other skilled
people (with a different / complementary skillset) to collaborate on a side
project. I'm doing just fine for myself as far as my career is concerned, but
at this point I'm convinced startup life is in my blood so I am going to
continue looking for that fix even if it's only to dedicate a few hours a
week.

With all the news about VCs tightening their budgets, I imagine folks may want
to start considering spreading their tentacles into many different side
projects to see if anyone out there would be a solid partner.

------
jondubois
Weebly, Wix, Yola, etc... People can make their own websites now - They don't
need web developers. Some bigger firms with more advanced requirements might
still need web developers but 90% of websites don't require that much skill
anymore.

I think the entire software development profession is under threat. I think in
the not-so-distant future, there will be drag-and-drop UI tools for businesses
to build their own application frontends and they will hook them up into
various plug-and-play backend services for a monthly fee (without hosting
their own servers).

The only software developers/engineers remaining will be the ones working for
backend service (e.g. BaaS) providers - The others will be designers.

~~~
swah
And why wouldn't there be competition in the drag-and-drop UI tool space?

------
DyslexicAtheist
who moved my cheese?

There is lots of opportunities now around Embedded Systems for web engineers
due to the IoT (say what?). More precisely the _" Web of Things"_ [1] (see
also WoT W3 WG). I always considered the web my thing and only recently jumped
(after long reluctance) onto this. There is a real get-go attitude in this
domain and you can tell companies are willing to spend money on it which makes
the same jobs less of an uphill struggle.

Most web developers I know wouldn't touch anything embedded with a stick but
this is really an interesting topic to get into. To explain why this is a good
match consider that a lot of the fundamental skills stay same because it will
essentially be built on the same concept of linkable data so you can take
along all you know (e.g. REST, TCP/IP, JavaScript, NodeJS). Also look into
these IoT counterparts:

    
    
       * JSON => JSON-LD [2]
       * HTTP => CoAP [3]
    
    

If you like security there are massive challenges due to the real-life damage
an exploit can cause (hacked insulin pumps, or vehicles etc.) but from skills
pov again pretty much the same skills you can just carry across and apply them
there.

[1] [http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2015/05/30/the-web-of-
th...](http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2015/05/30/the-web-of-things-needs-
your-support/) [2] [http://json-ld.org/](http://json-ld.org/) [3]
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7252](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7252)

------
Swannie
This is more or less the direct rise of "digitisation".

Companies now realise that their online/mobile experience is no longer a "me
too", but good customer experience is a powerful differentiator in market.

Freelance will go away. High value consulting will not. If you're not helping
the average Digital Director in solving their challenges (be they scaling,
conversion rates, cross device compatibility, load times, security, cost of
maintenance, uptime).

------
FreedomToCreate
There is a lot of work. You are just looking for the wrong type.

~~~
sarahparmenter
There is, but it appears to be harder than ever for newbies to get hold of it.

~~~
whorleater
Isn't that because that entire area of work (Wordpress blogs/basic
websites/basic webfronts/etc) has been supplanted by Squarespace and all? Web
documentation and tools have also gotten _vastly_ better in the past few
years, thereby allowing more people to get into the web industry, which then
leads to a glut of supply while demand remains the same. I can hammer out a
semi-functional webapp in a weekend now with backend in Meteor with a UI in
React, whereas if I wanted to do this ~5 years ago I probably would've been
stuck writing my own UI on top of Rails. Your article frames it as a bad
thing, and I'm not sure it is a bad thing, it just means that demand has
shifted to higher, more specialized web developers.

------
spectrum1234
I was assuming this was about how the easier design aspects are becoming more
standardized and available as code.

I think this is really what the issue is and she completely missed it.

------
Theodores
This is good news to those of us that detest the way web design agencies work.
These web design agencies only have themselves to blame. Far too often web
design agencies see the finish line as the site going live. Actually, that is
just the start.

These web design agencies also under-bid and under-deliver, leaving the client
at a loss for support. Even if they wanted support the web design agency are
already on their next under-bid job that has to be churned out with no
consideration of building a maintainable site.

The other failure is the way these web design agencies work. Up until
relatively recently all I was seeing was some PDF printouts drawn by some kid
that learned how to do CMYK stuff vaguely in Photoshop at some second-rate
educational facility. To hell with mobile, accessibility and all those things.
Why use content when you can obliterate your clients copy with 'lorem boring
ipsum' everywhere and totally ignore having engaging content that actually
fits the boxes. Why have a homepage that can be easily updated by the client
to suit their business needs to be always fresh when you can bake in something
that looks pretty but doesn't have anything to do with the underlying
information architecture of the client's copy?

Typically these web design agencies also have micro managers on full time
staff to then hire and fire developers to deliver the deliverables. These
developers are always treated like mushrooms - kept in the dark - and what
they deliver has to be a kludge. For instance, the kid armed with Photoshop
that has put together the 'lorem ipsum' PDFs that the client has signed off on
knows nothing of real design (how it works) so page headings float about all
over the place from page to page, often with bespoke kerning that kind of
insults the reader and the font designer. Therefore, frontend developer has no
choice but to have about 432 lines of CSS just for H1 tags once the CSS has
been compiled. There could be just the one H1 style for the whole site but the
design process makes that totally impossible.

These web design agencies with their micro-managers also play a game of
Chinese Whispers. You know the deal - conference calls which take as long to
get started as the actual meeting lasts, with everyone on the call except the
guys doing the work. This then gets briefed down to the actual web developers
with some drip feed that means the guys doing the actual work don't get to
build something that has a 'systems approach' to it, instead everything is a
kludge.

For people that know nothing of 'git' I hope that there is absolutely no work
for them, they should never have been wasting clients time in the first place,
forever selling them snake oil and half baked 'solutions'. For those of us
that do use ye-olde-version-control the future is as bright and busy now as it
ever has been. My inbox is always full with people begging me to work for
them.

Too many companies have evolved from a normal business to a web business where
all kinds of departments use the web for their actual needs. The website is
core to their business and not some 'must have' add on that some daft agency
has put together for them. Good on them for bringing talent on from in-house,
these folk understand the business, the customers and the internal stake
holders needs. This is what we do want to see, not this Chinese Whispers games
with so-called web agencies that have useless micro-managers and totally
undervalue genuine talent.

I may sound a bit over-generalising but I have worked on both sides of the
table, in-house and with these useless 'award winning' agencies. As well as
these web design agencies I also hope these SEO companies die a quick death.
Hours can be wasted with these folk agonising over links that nobody cares
about, with them adding on turgid tracking stats javascript rubbish that
doesn't deliver.

~~~
RobertKerans
Yeah, that's harsh, but i've worked on both sides as well, and can't say
you're wrong. Maybe there are some top-quality agencies building maintainable
sites, but I'm yet to see any.

Unless it's a throwaway, postcard-type site, design agencies seem a holdover
from print, pre-internet, where that model worked. But lower end they're not
needed, and once there are real things to do, I don't see how they can compete
with internal teams that know the business and can build incrementally
refined, VC controlled applications.

I work for a big B2B company with a multitude of subcompanies, and maybe it's
just bad experiences, but every agency-designed site we have is a badly-
architectured piece of crap. Some look shiny, but they're all clearly rushed
out, massively overpriced, and integrations with product databases/vendor
systems/factory systems are close-to-impossible. And the latter part is key;
building UI over those is the key part of my job, I'm designing interfaces to
allow people to buy things easily, and agencies don't seem to be geared toward
interfaces, rather they're set up to make pretty pictures.

------
quxbar
There just isn't a market for mediocre websites as a craft anymore - clients
need social media profiles plus a squarespace, and then they're done.

------
HoppedUpMenace
So basically the web design work that anyone could do with little to no
training now has to be done by people with degrees and a deep understanding
for how the web operates and that can adapt to shifting web design paradigms
without significant retooling of skills.

------
LargeCompanies
My strong point is that I am a UI/UX Designer who uses code to design; design
and code .. get feedback.. reiterate once or twice and boom your site is done.

One thing I lack is strong JS skills and I'm sure if I don't ramp them up it's
going to hurt me in the next few years.

------
bigger_cheese
How much has social media and mobile affected things. I'd imagine having a
good social media presence and an iphone app would be seen as more important
then the website for a lot of companies nowadays. Can you transfer web design
skills to app design?

------
adamredwoods
Web design goes in-house when there's a need for more than just "web design".
It's now a total design package, from web to social to print.

Agencies are still fighting for that work. There's an ebb & flow in every
industry.

------
the_watcher
I get that it's frustrating for freelancers who used to be able to make a nice
living doing web work, but this just reads as someone complaining that their
skills are no longer in such short supply.

------
hartator
I wonder what's the initial joke.

------
MuEta
It's reporting a 500 server error - does anyone have a mirror/archive?

~~~
kylec
The server has dried up, too

------
dcgoss
The audio narration of the blog is a brilliant idea.

------
kempe
To only know webdesign is a very limited focus.

------
fiatjaf
That's great.

------
zwischenzug
bootstrap?

~~~
jraines
I guess this got downvoted due to brevity, but I would guess this is
contributing, along with Wordpress themes. Not on the level of e.g.
Squarespace, but definitely a factor. For a while every site I looked at
having to do with bitcoin looked to be a Bootstrap site.

------
Polindo
The times are a changing o..O

------
justsaysmthng
Intuitively I feel like this is true and it kind of makes sense. The same
thing is (or will soon be) happening to mobile app developers.

One of the reasons is that technology is getting better and more standard
compliant - that means browsers, operating systems, servers/CMSes, etc.

Compare laying out your content using flexbox with old-school CSS black magic
which also worked on IE 6. It's beyond comparison!

Then there is the "new blood" coming into the industry every year. Millions of
young developers, with access to superior training materials/tutorials and
libraries. These new people "dilute" the market and make it easier for
businesses to hire full time web devs than look for freelancers.

The third reason - and I don't like to say it because some people take this
very emotionally, but it's the truth - is open source.

Take jQuery and Bootstrap. Back in the day, people had to re-implement parts
of these libraries inside their projects by hand with various degrees of
success. This was both necessary and time consuming - time which could be
billed to your client. This represented between 30% - 80% of the amount of
work on a website. Now it is no longer necessary.

I could continue with these examples and move on to the "backend" and so on,
but you get the point.

I think the trend will continue to accelerate and will envelop app developers,
"back end" developers and most "generalist" developers.

We have to face it - software is getting cheaper and a lot less "magical" than
it used to be. To top it off, I could add another two letters to the cake -
AI, which will eat the lunch of maybe half of the existing devs in the next
decade or so.

