What is the message here? It’s very hard to follow the thread here.

This is so elitist.

Ok so, I wear pretty much all the hats in my office too, like this guy is suggesting he does (* which with a personal website like this he probably does)... But I hate this sort of "You can't call yourself a designer if..." attitude.

Just because your skill-set is different to someone else, doesn't mean you can discredit a specialist for specializing in something.

But the post kind of rambles and is pretty hard to follow. Definitely an 'ok boomer' post

I do understand this issue but its framed a bit... strangely. I don't think it's accurate to call yourself "Product Designer", when in actuality you design web based user interfaces. I find it even more wrong if people who use that term to describe themselves practice gate keeping to people do describe themselves as web designers or frontend designers.

The term is important, it usually discerns what you do. Those terms for jobs have emerged because they people wo use them to describe themselves have a different constructed reality around their work. What that means is that they are not thinking any more about their work as "making websites" anymore, instead they are thinking about it as "making a product". So a web designer becomes a product designer.

The term doesn't say much about the people, it's says much about the industry we are working in. It shows that today, digital experiences are very often primarily thought of as marketable products first. This frame of thinking comes with its own terms for observed differences (= constructed reality; constructivism in a system). That is where this term is coming from. People don't think about websites anymore, they also don't think about experiences anymore, they think about products.