Back in the 80's, when I was in college, there was all kinds of crazy talk about one day, in the future, designing ads on a computer.
I know, kooky. We'd be living under the sea and vacationing on the moon before that happened.
I was attending a prestigious design school. An, expensive, prestigious design school. And for all that money, they were bound and determined to PREPARE US FOR THE FUTURE. So they opened one of the first computer design labs. Although Macs had recently been introduced, they were, in hindsight, pretty rudimentary and little more than word processors. No, for us, nothing but state-of-the-art would do. Our little lab was outfitted with...
The "AESTHETES 1000".
It was Dutch.
And they cost $250,000.
Each.
It was bigger than a refrigerator laid on it's side, and resembled the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. The desktop surface sported a keyboard and hundreds of color coded membrane switches. Embedded at the far edge were a dozen small monitors, each displaying a constant stream of code, like "The Matrix". At eye level were three large monitors to display our futuristic computer designs. Sitting at it you felt like you were in Mission Control. The Future had arrived!
It took awhile to get the hang of it, but after several weeks I became quite the master. Enter in a dozen coordinates with the keyboard, then hit an equal number of switches, in the correct order, and voila!
A square.
Actually, mine was more a rhombus.
By the end of the class I could not only do squares, but circles and triangles too.
And I took my new found computer knowledge out into the work force and discovered...
Nobody had an Aesthetes 1000.
Are you kidding? For a quarter of a million dollars? There were cheaper ways to draw a square. Like with a pen.
At any rate, it was soon a moot point. Within a year, Macs had advanced light years and the first design software was introduced, and before you knew it, the Aesthetes 1000 was obsolete and consigned to the dustbin of computer history. Can't even find it on Google anymore.
Macs soon became the standard for the design industry, and still are to this day. There was a steep learning curve as we all switched to digital, but once proficient, it was pretty easy to keep up with the times. The upgrades and advances were incremental and manageable.
And then the damn internet arrived.
People at the time said it was the future of design, but at dial-up speeds that seemed pretty unlikely. At best it could display the same static images we designed for print. But with the arrival of broadband and new software, soon design was moving and morphing, spinning and jumping through hoops.
And you had to keep up.
I made a good faith effort for years, signing up for night classes and weekend seminars, spending thousand of dollars for courses and software. But as soon as you learned one, a new one sprung up to render it obsolete. I learned one program, which was soon dead. Then another. And a third. Soon after I completed the course for the third one, a new program came out...
Flash.
It immediately rendered the last program I learned irrelevant.
"I'm not falling for THAT again" I thought. So when the opportunity to learn Flash cropped up, I passed.
And Flash has been with us for the past ten years.
At first not knowing it wasn't much of a hindrance. Working in Flash is essentially writing computer code, a decidedly "left brain" pursuit. Art and design is pure "right brain", and never the two shall meet. I've never met anyone who was good at both. People who claim they are are usually half-assed at both. In a simpler and more genteel time, designers would design the logos and web pages and ads, storyboard how it should all spin around on the web, and then pass it off to a code jockey to make it all happen.
But when I found myself back on the job market a couple of years ago, it soon became apparent the knowledge of Flash had become a prerequisite. The prevailing attitude now is "why pay two people for one job", and since programmers can't design worth shit, we'll make the designers learn code.
So reluctantly I signed up for yet another weekend course.
From the moment I opened the program I knew there would be problems. The control panel looked like the flight deck of a 747. The instructor moved fast and within an hour I was already deep in the weeds. It was obvious I stood about as good a chance of learning the program as I did of learning to pilot a jet plane. But still I soldiered on.
At the morning break, I ran into the instructor out on a smoke break.
"So why did you sign up for the course?" he asked.
I explained that knowledge of Flash was a deal breaker for any job these days.
"Well, not for long" he said.
He then explained that Flash was pretty much obsolete - new programs more adapted to all the social media were already widely in use and newer ones still were on the immediate horizon.
"Plus," he added, "Flash programmers are a dime a dozen - the market is saturated."
I quietly went back into the classroom and closed up my laptop and left.
At any rate, the reason I mention all this is an emailed job posting I received this morning that brought back years of programming angst.
Two years ago when I lost my job, I signed up for a service that collates job listings that match your predetermined criterion from all the online job boards. I've applied to hundreds of them without so much as an auto-response. The email used to run several pages long, with 20 or 30 jobs a day. Now it arrives with only one or two "jobs", usually unpaid internships. Some days it doesn't arrive at all... no jobs today.
But the one this morning caught my eye because of this:
REQUIRED SKILL SET
Must have expert proficiency in: Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash Dreamweaver, Microsoft Office, Powerpoint, Keynote, Quark, Wordpress, Filemaker Pro and Cinema 4D.
Must have working knowledge of Javascript, CSS, HTML/DHTML/XHTML, Flex, Action script developer, Maya.
Knowledge of AJAX, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Facebook, MySpace, iPhone apps a HUGE PLUS.
That's 24 programs! That's like learning 24 languages. Do you know anyone who can speak 24 languages? I sure as hell don't.
And don't let the listing fool you. If there's one thing I've learned, it's how to decode job listings. First of all "working knowledge" means you better know how it works, because you're going to be working with it. It's not like "working knowledge of Spanish" because you can order off the menu.
And second, any time knowledge of a particular software is listed as "a huge plus" means not knowing it is a huge minus.
But this is just insane. It's enough to make you throw in the towel and sit back and await the arrival of our new Robot Overlords. Because at this rate the Robots will be the only ones qualified to get a job.
I know, sounds kooky.
