Yes, and it really made me angry. The situation was, i was moderately competent at HTML but a mediocre web designer. My main expertise and responsibility was at the architecture/infrastructure level. I was working for a big consulting company that was working on a multi-million dollar project. They had a "decent" web designer, better than I am by far even though he was a bit eccentric and had to be kept in check. So the guy leaves, and they don't replace him. Instead they just tell me to design the pages. On a multi-million dollar project where one of the primary goals was usability and look & feel, they have an architect who bills the client at $85/hr doing it. I kept saying, shouldn't we get someone more qualified to do this? All the pages I made looked terrible because I simply didn't know how to make them good enough. I can make cheesy pages for intranet apps but not stuff fit for a multi-million dollar project with thousands of simultaneous users.
Eventually one of the dumb managers (same guy who didn't see the problem with disabling the back button) said in response to my repeated request for a professional designer, "I've never seen someone ask whether someone else can do their job for them because they are too lazy to do it". Famous last words. They were "shocked" that I decided to go work directly for the client.
