In reply to Marc.

This “don’t be scared of change” response is not reflective of what is actually happening.

Let me clue you in.

This morning a client contacted me about a broken site I constructed in 2017. It’s a property rental site which relies on a lot of custom code. The client company has changed hands a few times and so I’ve not been in touch with them recently. They were prompted by the dashboard to update to WP5. They pressed the button. Outcome: the site doesn’t work any more. Their business is down.

Now, I get paid to fix these things, I’ll just tell them the price and if they agree I schedule it in, no problem for me.

Once their site is up again they will find that the page previously filled with styled form fields and custom integrations is now replaced with Gutenberg, and they will find that editing a property is now much more difficult. They aren’t writing articles with complex layouts, they are editing a CMS to run their online business.

So they will call me and say “Why is it still broken?” and I will explain that changes to WP mean they need to pay me to make the site run as it once did. I need to turn the old code into Blocks.

Am I afraid of change? Not if I’m not getting the blame for it breaking. Not if I get paid.

Are the clients afraid of change? Not really, but there’s a clerical worker tasked with entering property data and she can’t do her job. Her boss is really annoyed. Annoyed at costs, annoyed at downtime. Everyone is secretly thinking its probably my fault somehow because I’m the website guy.

This is what’s happening in the real world.