In the early days of the web, web designer used to earn as much as £800 per day (~$1200 at the time) for handcrafting HTML in vi or Notepad, doing a bit of image manipulation in Paint Shop Pro.<p>Then Hotmetal Pro came along and we all had up learn the Dark Art of CGI scripting to maintain the daily rates. Then Cold Fusion took over, et cetera, et cetera.<p>Skills are constantly rendered redundant by technology and&#x2F;or commoditised because they get taught in mainstream education.<p>You have to keep upgrading your skills.