I am reminded of the Picasso story where he meets a woman in a park and makes a 30 second sketch. The woman asks how much it would cost to buy it and he replie

I am reminded of the Picasso story where he meets a woman in a park and makes a 30 second sketch. The woman asks how much it would cost to buy it and he replies something like $1000 (insert large amount of money for 30 seconds of work). She asks him why so much money for 30 seconds of work and he replies that it took him 30 years to draw that sketch. It's easy to build a simple website with no frills that does exactly what the client needs -- if you know how to do it. Even then, it is rarely easy to figure out what the client needs! A colleague wanted to use a Javascript library for something I thought was probably pretty simple. I suggested we take a look at the library and see what it was doing and determine if it was worth the extra dependency. He joked, "If I wanted to know how it worked, I wouldn't have chosen a dependency". Luckily, it's not how my colleague really feels, but this is exactly what's happening most of the time. Things are over complicated because people don't know how to build them -- they glue together a patchwork of stuff so that they don't have to know. In the end, they tend to build something whose complexity is many orders of magnitude higher than the complexity of the problem they are working on. Your two years of job security was not for avoiding framework-of-the-day hype: it was for knowing how to do it. It's the simple 30 second, single line sketch that captures the picture perfectly with no extra complexity. That takes years and years of experience to develop -- and a desire to even get there at all.