Title inflation lowers the perceived value of professional development work. It goes from &quot;I don&#x27;t understand what you&#x27;re doing, but it looks hard&quot; to &quot;My ten year old nephew set up a WordPress site, so why should I pay you $150k a year to build the CRUD backend for my brilliant startup idea?&quot;<p>All professions that don&#x27;t have gatekeepers, certification, and strong professional associations suffer from declining salaries.<p>The difference between good and bad web dev is the difference between a site that scales, is maintainable, secure, and reliable, and looks nice, as opposed to a WP site that does none of the above. (But looks nice - maybe.)<p>I&#x27;ve talked to &quot;designers&quot; who say things like &quot;I don&#x27;t know if we can do that - I leave all those details to my technical people.&quot;<p>It turns out all the &quot;designer&quot; did was pick a font and a colour scheme and draw a few wireframes. And they got the job because they knew someone on the board.<p>Meanwhile the &quot;technical people&quot; have done all the real work - and could probably make a site look just as good if they&#x27;d been asked to.