UX or UX/UI? Is there life for a UX designer in our reality?

Question

User interface

We all know what UX design and UI design are, and how they differ from each other ... attention to the question: is it mandatory for a UX designer to also be a UI designer and is it possible to stay afloat in our realities? "only doing UX? Your opinion is interesting.
PS Why this question - in the vast majority of vacancies, these concepts are combined into a mutant called UX / UI designer.

Answer 1

Ilya Savelyev : The concept of a UX designer has not yet settled down and is very vague, different companies understand it differently. If we talk about mid-level companies, then there is a self-sufficient specialty - an interface designer, without the admixture of a draftsman.
The UX designer analyzes the behavior of users, the course of their thoughts when working with the project. What is the result of the work of a thoroughbred UX designer in the process of developing a site / application? Prototype. It is a visualization of the results of analysis and research. Therefore, your path is an interface designer, aka a UX designer, without a UI.
At the same time, top companies share the specialties of an interface designer and a UX analyst; analysts are engaged in pure UX in them. Few companies can afford this - these are companies like Alfa-Bank, VTB, Mail.Ru, AGIMA studios, Google, and so on. I'm not sure about these brands specifically, but the separation occurs somewhere at their level.
The evolution of the UI designer is quite funny - first there was a web designer, then a UI designer whose competence includes interface design and basic knowledge of usability, and recently former web and UI designers began to call themselves UI / UX designers, since it is assumed that their competence expanded to the development of some user experience. And few of them can say why they called themselves UX designers. Well, the trend is, it's just, they say, the name of the profession has changed, uguk. And what is a basic understanding of UX design (as a basic understanding of usability used to be necessary) to call yourself a UI / UX designer is little understood.
Now there is a growing trend of Product Designers who stop calling themselves UI / UX designers and ... the devil knows that after "and ...", I don't understand who these people are).

Answer 2

There are pure UX vacancies on the headhunter, there are also vacancies on my circle, see the lists of vacancies of large and not very firms, many of them began to have exactly UX vacancies

Answer 3

Dichotomy of UI and UX: UI designer ≠ UX designer

Answer 4

Полагаю, что видеозапись UX-среды #29 является в какой-то степени, ответом на Ваш вопрос - https://it.mail.ru/broadcasts/49/