The England of my youth was a desert for good food. The difference between a "good" restaurant and an average one lay mostly in the surroundings; that and the use of slightly more expensive ingredients. But white cotton table cloths and snooty service weren't enough to hide the mediocre food that lay therein. That’s why I used to relish my regular trips overseas, to eat at restaurants where the owners actually cared about what they were producing.
It’s interesting seeing how quickly hamburger menus have turned from handy UI element to social pariah. Rarely a day goes by without some young designer pronouncing hamburger menus the biggest UI crime since Clippy.
The organising principles of agile are based around the needs of developers. So processes and systems are broken down into units of functionality and fed to development teams along a pipeline of delivery.
I meet them on a regular basis, tech-savvy teens who've been coding websites from an early age. They'll often seek my advice about breaking into the industry. Should they continue their studies or jump straight into the labour market? I usually tell them that ability trumps education and I don't put much faith on the current raft of tech degrees. So I'd prefer to see three years of experience than three years of study.
Every few weeks I see a discussion emerge that tries to dismiss the need for specialists in our industry, or refute their existence entirely. It usually goes along the lines of "I'm a [insert discipline] and I do my own [insert activity] so [insert specialism] is unnecessary or doesn't exist".
I meet a lot of in-house designers in the course of my travels and the same frustrations keep bubbling up - "how can I convince the company I work for to take my expertise seriously". It seems that companies have a pathology of hiring highly talented people but taking away the decision making abilities they need to do their job.