Thank you for saying this far more eloquently and admittedly less emotionally than I had originally written in the reply I decided not to post. I love LCTHW, but as a designer, this post was a little offensive to me - it read as "Well, if you can't do the hard stuff, do the easy stuff."
Basically, my gist was that web design is already overwhelmed with people that used it as a backup plan - be it print designers, graphic designers or general artists that realized the former two were all moving into web and that's where the money was. The outcome of this can be seen across the web; information hierarchy and complementary interaction design take a backseat to overdone graphics and bad UX.
If you're going to be designing for code, you're going to need to understand code, particularly CSS/JavaScript capabilities and fallbacks. It will make you a better designer and possibly help you transition into the dev you wanted to be.
> If you can lay out all the major screens and the design then that’s worth its weight in gold. Design is also just about as hard to find as programming.
Not every person is created equal. If you aren't sprinting successfully, maybe you'd be a better endurance athlete -- this isn't to say that sprinting is better than endurance, it is just saying that is is a different and complimentary skill that you might have success with. Queue Sly and the Family Stone
Oh I would absolutely encourage anyone who wants to be involved in web to try their hand at either, but if worse comes to worse and they don't find themselves particularly cut out for them, design tends to be the one that they stick with because it's easy to look like you produced "something" and there's always somebody out there willing to buy "something" if the price is right.
Having watched a few people struggle to the point where they are switched off of projects regularly and haven't left a job on their own terms, I think it is worth acknowledging that the allure of working in this/any industry may outshine one's passion to do so and it may be healthier to find greener pastures than to settle on the one that's "good enough". There are also a lot of auxiliary roles to designers and developers that they may find a lot more fulfilling and that give them the opportunity to learn over time.
Basically, my gist was that web design is already overwhelmed with people that used it as a backup plan - be it print designers, graphic designers or general artists that realized the former two were all moving into web and that's where the money was. The outcome of this can be seen across the web; information hierarchy and complementary interaction design take a backseat to overdone graphics and bad UX.
If you're going to be designing for code, you're going to need to understand code, particularly CSS/JavaScript capabilities and fallbacks. It will make you a better designer and possibly help you transition into the dev you wanted to be.