Is front-end web development dying?

[KevinM1]

Like benny said, Wix, GoDaddy, and other sites as a platform providers generally only offer template-based solutions.  One-size fits most, cookie cutter, simplistic (simple blog, maybe a widget to plug into your Twitter feed, etc.) solutions.  But, it's not like this is some new thing.  WYSIWYG editors provided by hosts has been a thing for at least 15 years.  I remember farting around with Homestead's editor in the early 2000's.

Here's the thing: none of those tools make someone a good, or even competent designer.  They're marketed towards people who don't want to pay a professional for a professional site.  The kind of people who think they can knock out a good-enough looking site after a few hours of farting around on a weekend.  And, of course, the ads make it look easy.  Select this thing, move or stretch this other thing, pick complimentary colors and/or fonts and boom, you have a good looking site that you didn't have to pay a premium for.  

In reality, most of these people pick garish color combinations (or, on the flip side, drab colors... gray is on its way out, people).  They choose Comic Sans as their primary font because they think it looks 'cute'.  They emphasize the wrong things by having shitty element/widget placement, or otherwise simply not really knowing how to organize what products/services they offer in a way that makes sense to others (this happens a lot... what's simple/easy/clear for someone in a particular domain isn't necessarily the same for those outside it).

So, while there's more user-friendly tools than ever before, that only means that there's more opportunities for front end developers to come in and save the day once a small business owner tries and fails doing it on the cheap.  That's how I got my current client.  She's more or less technologically illiterate, and payed some idiot $500 for a WordPress site.  It wasn't even half finished by the time she had enough and needed help.  I came in and saved the day.  Now, I'm a bit more than halfway through turning what was essentially an online brochure into an e-commerce site powered by Stripe.

The moral of the story: consumer grade innovations don't automatically mean the end of professional work in the same domain.  In many ways, it can actually increase opportunity.

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I've been amazed just how long front end development has continued in the state that it has. When you're faced with a mess of code filled with HTML, Javascript, JQuery, Spring, Java and whatever other library or framework someone has chosen to use, it's all a complete mess. And what does it all do? Essentially just inputs, queries and retrieves data from a database and then displays it. In terms of structured software engineering it's the web development equivalent to writing a word processor in assembler. And what do people do? They create yet another framework to use alongside existing technologies and make it even more difficult than it needs to be.

Couldn't agree more. I basically lost a (junior) job in Web Development because after being thrown in at the deep end... I sunk; just surrounded by HTML, Javascript, CSS etc with no idea how it all fit together, and no instruction other than to work it out for myself.

And I agree also that it seems so much for so little... and from that perspective I don't like app development either because most of the programming involved is about appearance. In other words give me behind the scenes programming, that actually does something interesting, any day.

I prefer the back end (/Vorls) for that very reason. It's essentially the brains of the entire thing. Code that actually fulfills a purpose. Plus, I'm not very artistic. I can sort of feel my way through a design, and make something mostly competent, but I'll never be able to make something more than pleasantly functional.