Email Developers are not going away

I originally had planned to send out a newsletter about how my email design system is evolving, but in EmailGeeks I’ve been sucked into whether email development is still a viable career path. There’s been a lot of chatter about this lately, with articles by industry vets citing that email development as we know it is on the decline, and that we’re all going to have to go back to being generalists. This is especially timely as I hit my 3 year mark working at Sinch as their Senior Email Developer.

Anyway, I gave my answer about email development in the form of a voice note, so this is edited and condensed to make sense. Note these are strictly my opinions:

I think it's a very interesting time for email development because drag and drop editors are becoming more advanced. I think we'll do fewer basic emails, one-off templates, all that jazz.

And I think we're gonna move towards building out more comprehensive templates and email design systems and working on higher level tasks to make the code work in things like WYSIWYGs, visual editors, and different email builders.

My new perspective is that we can enable people build good email and I don't think email developers are going to go anywhere.

The doom and gloom perspective recently is that email developers are gonna have to stop niching and become generalists again.

I think enterprise companies will still need us. I think we will be needed for intense personalization and other more advanced coding, like interactive email or amp for email.

I think there's good work being done out there to bring email code up to standards. It’s going to be on email developers to keep talking about accessibility and how to build good emails, so we don’t need to give up quite yet. In my opinion, the future of email development is still bright.

Or at least I won’t go down without fighting!

I’m going to try to get back to writing consistently. See you in a few weeks, yeah?

— Megan

P.S. If you haven’t listened to it yet, Geek Out! With Megan and Carin is a really fun, mostly non-email related podcast that Carin Slater and I launched earlier this year. Video games! Anime! Board Games! We’ve got it all. Give it a listen and leave us a voice note or comment! We love hearing from people. And please share it, we need more plays, ha! 🙂