Recent designers I've met around NYC have been novices, jquery dependents, and people who took a 12 week how to code ruby class and somehow got hired. To me a designer is someone who can make a site look good in photoshop and then hand it off to be implemented/coded. Designers who code, but who are not 'coders' scare the crap out of me and I avoid them like the plague. Web 'apps' today are that, apps, making API calls, binding data, and managing state - along with profiling for speed, memory, and where resources are loaded from. It's just like any other GUI of the last 20 years. Sure there are UI designers, but they typically aren't coding it together, but I guess the short supply of programmers has exacerbated the situation.