Doing What We Do, Better

In "A winter of discontent in the web design world?", Christian Heilmann discusses things that we, as web designers and developers, take for granted, and could be doing better. He also touches on the topic of educating the next generation, which I've been writing here about:

Not so hidden agenda: getting graduates hit the ground running

And this is where a lot of the “forget the old ways, here, write less and achieve more” mentality comes from. Companies are hard pushed to hire as many engineers as they need so they want to make web development interesting for people who just came out of university. Now, in university we learn nothing that is of much use in web development. Re-educating people is a long and arduous process so let’s bring the things we learn in university into the market deliveries.

This is a good idea to hire people and to stop them from building native code (Android, iOS) instead of thinking about becoming web developers. It washes out the craft though, which is always the case when things become mainstream and need lots of people.

Where we think we build Chippendale furniture, the market needs more IKEA Billies and it makes sense to teach new people to build those.