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Comment by Malic | Hacker News Reader

I had a chance to attend An Event Apart ... er, event, in Chicago somewhere between 10-15 years ago and it was downright inspirational. There was a real sense of being together with other professionals to better learn about our craft. And there was so much back then that was still new! Amazing times

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I also attended Chicago event a few years ago. I absolutely loved it, including the city of Chicago. My favorite part was accidentally having lunch with one of the attendees who happened to a speaker. https://gerrymcgovern.com/

I feel like UX as a discipline has changed so much particularly in the past few years that I've lost my love for it leading me to leave my job couple months ago to take a break.

To me, the Event Apart / A List Apart represent the golden days. While I'm sure the latter will live on, I will miss the Event Apart.

How has the UX discipline changed for you to such extent that you left your job?

I'm speaking about the UX at multi billion dollar US companies because those are my stomping grounds.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but the discipline has become unnecessarily complicated in terms of processes, toolsets / systems, and organizational structure.

Also I feel like we have giant chip on our shoulder and have a desire to incessantly reinvent and come up with new things, positions, and processes to keeps ourselves relevant.

UX was always a bullshit field. Large tech companies learned they could spend A LOT less time and money by adopting boring homogeneous design instead of paying artists to create beauty. See anything Eli Schiff wrote circa 2015-2016. He covered all of this in detail. Design used to be a respectable field. Now it’s all would be business analysts larping as UX designers who couldn’t draw their way out of a paper bag. They use big words and complicated methods to “design” systems that are intentionally ugly. You could say the same thing about a lot of fields I guess. The world is a now a very dull and ugly place. Just look at how at the past (the distant past), and how much artistry and thought went into even the smallest of everyday objects. This same process of modernization has happened to software. Except it didn’t take hundreds or thousands of years. It took a decade.

Small world. I, too, attended that event in Chicago and it's there that Twitter was the buzz and I first created my Twitter account, nearly 15 years ago.

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