It doesn't get any better. I was too annoyed with how many times in such a short article she managed to blame men for everything to do a thorough reading, but I was at least expecting to see some summary of great design elements we are all missing out on because of the focus on "frontend" over "web design".
I just came out of reading the article surprised at how little it had to do with gender. The point is there, and reasonably made IMO, but the article is mainly about the culture of front end dev.
Honestly, I ponder whether reacting to the mention of gender as harshly as this is remotely healthy or even logical.
>And, the boys in the industry at this time made it known that we were not "real" developers.
>the gendering of design as women's work is why people don't use the title "web designer" anymore. It's been belittled and othered away.
>Well, the area of front-end work, which has been heavily gendered as "feminine" work, was finally being viewed as "serious" or "real" programming because, to no one's surprise, something that is designed well is good for business. As a "real" career option for developers, now men are interested. You're welcome.
>Sorry, building websites is for us serious manly man engineers now who can do very difficult things like making the computers go beep boop.
>Since the "design" piece of web design is still viewed as a feminine role, that part of being a web designer was largely cut off from the front-end development role, now that men were all in on that role.
You are going to tell me that this person has any kind of numbers or studies to back any of this up? Show me something solid that says the majority male devs view web design as women's work. Until then it's just a rant.
The blame game is exhausting, inflammatory (often intentionally and this case is no exception), and I wish I could say played out but I don't think we are there yet.
Interesting, I came out of this article thinking the author is both sexist and a narcissist. Sexist, because she attributes the failings of the industry to the failings of the male gender. Narcissistic, because this whole article is written directly from her perspective, as if she just disregarded that other perspectives exist.
This is all fine, because it's her article and we can all do as we will, but I really cannot understand how you think this point is reasonably made.
Wait until you read the author's follow-up post on their Mastodon:
>Just a PSA: No, I won't be providing you data to prove that design has been viewed as women's work and thus anything related to design that touches development work (like web design!) has been eroded and chipped off from the block of knowledge you're expected to know. I'm tired. Do your own homework.
>"what data do you have" Me, bitch. I'm the data.
So, "Web design sucks cause of men. Source: trust me bro". Hard to believe anyone would think this could be taken seriously.
She said "hear me out", so I decided to give it a go, despite articles starting this way never being anything but a weird rant where the author assumes their personal experience is reflective of society as a whole ('main character syndrome'). This one did not disappoint.
The field of web design hasn't been recategorised due to it being gendered - in fact most web designers pre-2010 were men - it got refactored due to variances in how we see frontend and shortcuts to profit (capitalism).
It is now a lot more profitable to run a single or small sized team doing full stack and use templating, the various scaffolds of tailwind, bootstrap, etc or simply outsource the design elements, which are often a one time thing. Modern dev allows frontend and backend to be built in the same languages, abstracts heavily and often provides all the infrastucture too.
Web designers are broadly a dead category due to this, as are sysadmins, backend devs and frontend devs (all predominently male areas).
Ctrl+w