Remember the Typists
27 Feb 2020UI Frameworks are like surfboard templates. To learn how to create templates takes way more time and the prior knowledge of knowing how to handshape. But once you learn to rely on templates you can produce way more surfboards faster. UI Semantic is great because once learned, any average person can create great websites more quickly. UI Semantic is also very easy to pick up, my entire class learned it in less than a week under the guidance of our great professor, Professor Johnson. This isn’t to say we mastered it though. It is entirely worth the time learning because it will save us massive amounts of time in the future when it comes to making easy, good looking websites.
However, does this make our time and services less valuable if everyone can easily pump out websites?
As someone who hates the idea of being replaceable, I would say not entirely. People think machine-made surfboards are killing the surfboard industry; however, the only people who think that way are the people who still shape by hand. The people who use the machines think it’s great! This is similar to learning something like a UI Framework, if you invest a bit of time or money to learn it, you will be one of the people with the machines.
I always try to remind myself that back in the day, knowing how to type was a great and semi unique skill to have. Something as simple as knowing to type, which is a skill acquired by every software engineer or millennial with an iPhone, was a great career path. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projected that typists will be one of the fastest-declining jobs from 2016 to 2026. If you stay on raw css and javascript without learning things like UI’s and more advanced languages you can be replaced, just like the typists.