[Eric_WVGG]

This reminds me of how I was unemployed for a good chunk of the year 2001.

I was making a fresh start in a new city, and shopping my resumé to various graphics design firms. There was a prominent link to my portfolio site up top. After months of looking I didn’t get a single call-back.

Eventually I got a job in another industry, and noticed a bunch of Macs in the corner that they used for testing. One day I decided to load my portfolio site for fun... turned out there was a glitch in CSS support in Internet Explorer that would crash the browser, and since this was Mac OS “Classic”, that took down the entire machine.

Graphic design firms were all still on Macs with the old OS back in those days; I had been walking around crashing computers and destroying people’s work for months.

[tomxor]

In my first commercial attempt at web development I utilised a png transparency fix for IE6 (written in that IE6 specific filter thing). A few months later the client passed on a complaint from one of his customers whom's machine crashed whenever he visited the website... I removed the IE6 fix and all was well in the world - You can have nice things or MS, you can't have both.

[brennebeck]

I think MS is doing a pretty decent job of trying to repair that. Especially with developers.

[chrisper]

Is the new industry you are working in penetration testing?

[sizzle]

On the bright side, you are probably making 2-4x the salary of a graphic designer in today's market if you learned to code...

[Eric_WVGG]

I knew how to code in the first place. At the time, I was dismayed by the inability for most software developers to take UX/UI seriously, and decided that "the way forward" was to work with design professionals instead of being inside a party that was ostensibly on the same team but usually fought against designers.

Since then, the world has changed… some design firms have transitioned to be purely marketers, others just hire development firms that are happy to defer all UX to their partners, and others still have transitioned to be UX/UI design firms.