i have a really good friend who did the whole UI/UX design bootcamp during the explosion of UX/UI jobs. he did okay, he's probably hopped jobs 2-3 times now and is now without a job.
i actually feel for him, it's definitely one of the career paths that's looked at as excess/waste now while companies slim up to reappropriate money for AI. but i do think there was something there, he was genuinely passionate about what he did and it's just really hard to find work doing it now.
i feel guilty saying this but i've let him talk me through some of what he does, show me how he sees and approaches design (the bulk of what he did was design the interfaces for publicly used webapps and mobile apps) and... idk. i feel like it's all acquired taste and almost a "good app developer will think of these things when they design the front end" and a lot of his insight to me broadly looked like a lot of stuff i would've considered myself as a mere sidequest and my general thought process to deliver a good app. the difference is im building the app and designing the user experience, but his entire career is silo'd to just building the user experience.
im not against breaking out the design to a dedicated resource whether thats one designer or one team who wants to try and maintain a consistent language for a company. i think this has upside to make the design experience not locked to a single developer or developer team, and opens it up to a lot more channels of input. but on the other hand, like it's not the end of the world for me as a developer to come up with a really good design & i personally have never imagined myself not considering UX/UI at every corner when I'm building something. It feels like a second nature to me, there's creative aha moments to it, i think it's generally really good for a developer to step into a users shoes and almost "debug" the experience.
where i think ui/ux has gone off the rails:
- i think it's unduly influenced web design and has been poisoned by marketing. the rise of landing pages for SaaS that say a whole lot of fucking nothing and the crossover with "marketing research". i actually literally can't stand these types of pages, i swear 75% of the time i click around and can never get a straight answer on what the product/service is. examples: https://boomi.com https://www.astronomer.io
- things like OP, issue links opening in popups. changing things for the sake of changing things. such a change is probably "backed by research / surveys" giving the illusion that this was a data driven-decision, making it hard to push back on.... despite on deployment = everyone universally hating it. there seems to be some heavy flaws with the data sampling/collection methods that drive these decisions. i think the field of ux/ui as its own distinguished and defined field needs to undergo a self-awareness evolution here. something that's happened quite a few times in engineering. they really need to scoot back and have one of those "sometimes the best path forward is to not change anything at all" moments collectively and learn to recognize when that is right in front of you
- sometimes (maybe more than sometimes) allowing the business to dictate design is mayhaps not a good thing. i think what im trying to say here is the existence of "hes the ux/ui guy in the department, go talk to him" gives business stakeholders misaligned incentives to just go and push a change that isn't _actually_ user oriented, but is heavily tied into some metric or some other stupid business initiative. actually the more that i think about it this is probably why a lot ui/ux careers exist (give all control of the design over to the business) and that seems like a slippery slope