As someone who'd professionally identified as a UI Designer for over a decade, now turned developer, I have mixed thoughts. I think coding has made me a better

As someone who'd professionally identified as a UI Designer for over a decade, now turned developer, I have mixed thoughts. I think coding has made me a better designer. It's honed my priorities and made me realize a lot of my design aims in the past were motivated by ego, sometimes at the expense of getting a product out there quickly and getting real user feedback. Now in designing software UIs, because of the internet, I think taking the time to design and spec out premium UIs, with all the whiz-bangs, comes with immense risk, especially for startups that don't have the room to fail. We can iterate at a pace other industries cannot. But that also means our direct competitors can as well and they are moving quickly to meet their users' direct needs. I have also come to appreciate simpler UIs for their reliability, accessibility, and responsiveness. In my opinion, a lot of the design problems of screen-based UIs are solved. Browsing design-oriented forums nowadays, I see a trend I appreciate (back to simplicity) and a trend I think is misguided ('innovation' that strokes designer egos). The latter I don't think is going away. There's no doubt that the world is moved by art, brand, and image. The companies that wield those forces successfully, and not at the expense of functionality, will get the attention they want. The former, however, I think, is an argument for standardization, which I think means the need for fewer designers. The alarms were ringing a few years ago for me and I jumped ship. I'm glad I did and quite frankly, I now enjoy backend work much more than I do design; but it is very satisfying to take a project from start to finish. Something I missed out on when I was 'just' a designer.