Leaving and arriving

“To get there, I had to first understand I’m not cut for the web industry anymore.” Great and resonant post from a web designer whose frustration with the direction of the industry led them to find good work elsewhere. I think this is a common, if often unremarked upon, pattern. A lot of folks have been working on the web for twenty or more years now—two plus decades during which nearly everything has changed. One thing is abundantly clear to me: the skills that made people good at building websites are readily transferable and even sought out skills in other fields. Not just the code or the pixels, but the ability to organize, to project manage, to break a big goal down into discrete steps, to collaborate with people with very different expertise, to deeply understand how people experience technology in their lives, to learn and to be constructively critical when the work could be better. It’s possible that some number and some kind of tech jobs aren’t coming back; but there remains ever so much work to do in ever so many other directions. The path from one industry to another is never easy—but it can be traveled—and I have so much faith in the people who are ready to venture forward.