

Designers are more valuable than programmers - shawncrowley
http://spin.atomicobject.com/2012/01/24/designers-are-more-valuable-than-programmer/

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agentultra
Depends on the project I guess.

I can't really see how a designer is going to be much help developing
distributed hash tables, compilers, scalable push messaging frameworks,
drivers, network analyzers, packet routing systems, load balancers, linear
solvers, file systems, natural language processors, machine learning systems,
and a whole host of other software that makes the world tick.

~~~
jvanenk
eventually, at the top of the stack, there's some one who asked the question:
"how are people going to interact with this?"

my hash table is useless if the users can't tickle the UI in such a way as to
use the hash table.

~~~
onemoreact
Your assuming a lot about what's being built. If you start designing a UI for
a USB stick you have already failed. _how are people going to interact with
this?_ UC1, you plug it in and it works. UC2, you unplug it and it keeps your
files. End of use cases.

That's not to say design is unimportant, just that plenty of teams are better
off adding there 30th coder before their first designer. Others may be better
off adding there 10th designer before there 2nd coder, but I have never heard
of them.

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gaius
Very funny. Reminds me of when I worked in consulting. Let's say there were 3
months to do a project. For the first 11.5 weeks, the designers would be
arguing about "mood boards" and whether icons should be round or square. Then
in the middle of the last week, they would hand over to the programmers a
directory full of Photoshop files and say "build this" (usually the first time
the programmers had even heard about the project was now).

Then the programmers would be blamed for the project overrunning. Designers
need to be kept on a very short leash. Designers who can't program what they
design are worse than useless.

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blindhippo
"Ultimately, design is what drives business rules and software requirements."

Completely disagree: Business Rules drive design, not the other way around.
The article muddles together product development and design and calls it the
same thing. Product development incorporates BOTH design and coding - you
cannot separate the two and claim one half is more important then the other.

And has already been pointed out, there are far less developers out there then
designers. Guess which commodity is worth more to the average company given
this fact?

~~~
HPBEggo
From experience, I would say that a very good designer is worth considerably
more to a company than a very good developer.

This comes largely from the fact that the beneficial cap in skill for
designers is much higher than for developers.

With a developer, so long as they finish everything on time and it works as
intended, other concerns are largely irrelevant.

With a designer, there is always room to improve, so the difference between
the best designer and the next-best designer still provides some important
benefits, while this is not necessarily true for developers.

~~~
blindhippo
Until it comes to maintenance time and you discover that your cadre of less
then stellar developers has created a "works as indented" pile of excrement
that is largely unmaintainable. Then the difference between the best developer
and the next-best is no longer irrelevant.

In my experience, design is undervalued in most software projects, but the
sentiment expressed in this article is beyond over-correction.

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gyardley
Fascinating - this is a terrific description of what a good product manager
does, without using the term 'product manager' once.

I know designers with product skills, and I know designers without product
skills. Both are still designers.

Of course, claiming any one of these skill sets is more valuable than the
other is just linkbait. It's like trying to choose between your tibia and your
fibula - without either, you're not going far.

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untog
I don't agree. I _do_ think that designers are undervalued by a lot of people,
but I don't think that they are more important than programmers. Especially
when you factor in supply and demand- it's my perception (though I have
nothing more than anecdotal evidence to back it up) that there are more
designers looking for work than programmers, thus, the programmers you have
are more valuable to you.

It was interesting to see the section on "programmers as designers", though. I
was recently making an HTML5 app and web site to accompany it
(<http://www.taxono.my>), and had to make up the design as I went along. I
have no idea if it really looks good from a design perspective, but I couldn't
justify bringing a designer in, so I suppose I am just as guilty of
undervaluing designers as others are.

~~~
gdub
I think you are misunderstanding the point of Shawn's post. He is specifying
that a 'programmer' is just a 'coder'. A 'developer' or 'maker' is a
programmer that keeps the 'product' in scope by incorporating design as well
as code. A programmer-only is being trumped by developers that always keep
design and the customer in mind.

~~~
untog
I think that trying to draw a distinction between "programmer" and "developer"
isn't really a great idea, because a lot of people (myself included) would
consider the terms equivalent.

In that context, it makes the title seem a little "clickbait-y". "Programmers
are less valuable, except that I'm talking about a specific subset of
programmers" is less catchy though, I will grant you that.

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nske
In my opinion, most developers can produce a good, or even great, design in
acceptable time if they just wish so, while the reverse doesn't apply.

For a developer to come up with a good design, it takes: (a) common-sense, (b)
compatible-to-mainstream perception of what is ugly, and (c) willingness to
look around for ideas and play with things they might consider boring.

I have yet to encounter a decent developer that manages to do without (a) -hm,
ok maybe I know one java developer, but he's a special case!- (b) seems about
equally common and (c) is only a matter of motivation.

On the other hand, most designers I have met appear unable to try grasping and
utilizing the simplest of programming concepts. I don't know if their brain is
wired differently or if they despise or fear that stuff so much that their
subconscious blocks anything related, but, in any way, they seem much less
capable in producing any code in any amount of time, than most developers in
producing a pretty and usable design in a reasonable amount of time.

That's just my simple observation, based on the 15-20 people of both
professions that I know well enough.

So, for projects that want just a good design (i.e. at the level of twitter's)
and not an WOW-super-original design, I think that the work is fundamentally
simpler than coding, doesn't need much expertise and most developers can do it
pretty well _if_ they want. For those projects at least, which is the
majority, I don't see how designers are, or should be, more valuable than
coders.

For more specialized projects, like a desktop environment, usability experts
and designers might be a requirement, but still, I wouldn't go as far as to
consider them more valuable.

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apg
...and yet.

I like good design as much as the next person. But I'm not sure what a good
design even is anymore and this article isn't helping. It's throwing a lot of
concepts in that "design" bucket. Are we in the midst of a "design bubble"?
Are we - as in anyone who can look at a screen and make some kind of cogent
value judgment - all designers now? I'm pretty sure I've never chosen to use
something (keeping in the realm of software/technology) based on what it looks
like over the actual content/functionality it provided. Or is content and
functionality in the realm of the designer now?

And I think this statement is highly debatable: "Programmers who prefer to be
given detailed requirements and push syntax into a terminal or prefer to
isolate themselves from the broader product team will have decreasing value in
the world of innovation and product development."

That may or may not be true, time will tell. Too many cooks spoil the soup,
you know. And in time, when we are all designers, we just might want someone
to competently and efficiently push that syntax into that terminal.

Now I'm off to see if I can find any old issues of Raygun in my basement.

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mbenjaminsmith
"Programmers who prefer to be given detailed requirements and push syntax into
a terminal or prefer to isolate themselves from the broader product team will
have decreasing value in the world of innovation and product development."

I don't agree with the title but I agree with this sentence. There is some
software development that requires people with skills so advanced that they
can really do whatever they like. But most programming is tying systems
together and worrying about maintenance, error resilience and cost. While
those things are certainly not easy, I think they are becoming more manageable
by a broader set of people. You now can't really be a specialist (and
disregard everything else and without being in the top factions of a percent
of ability) in a field increasingly (successfully) filled by generalists.

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AznHisoka
I am working on my design skills by prototyping and wireframing with
Photoshop. I'm not an artist or illustrator by any means, but I can design
things fairly well from a high level.

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the_cat_kittles
The line between design and implementation is a blurry one in all fields. In
some cultures, the art _is_ the craft.

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billpatrianakos
Oh boy, not another one of these. Designers and programmers need to call a
truce already. One will always believe they are more important than the other
because they each think in totally different terms and have totally unique
perspectives on the same project.

The designer often thinks in terms of what _could_ be. They imagine new ways
of presenting information. Programmers think more in terms of what is
realistic, what the rules are, and how to play by the rules while still being
able to make the design a reality.

I fall into the "developer" category the article talks about. It's strange
though. I don't know what others think but I always thought that designers
weren't the guys who just drew designs on paper and in photoshop. I think a
lot of people think of designers as "point and click" guys and programmers as
"keyboard jockeys". I always perceived designers as the ones who did do the
point and click stuff but also got their hands dirty in CSS, JavaScript, HTML,
etc. I always thought of designers as programmers who mainly use markup,
presentation, and visual effects code while programmers were the guys doing
the back end work. Apparently that's now how others think.

I think both are equally important. The only one I think is less important is
the designer that stays strictly in the realm of point and click, photoshop,
pad and pencil work. These days as long as you can code in either the
markup/style realm or the backend server side realm then you're just as
valuable as anyone.

One is not better than any other. They're just different! These debates only
serve to create prejudices and make it harder for the person doing the
HTML/CSS to work with the guy doing the Rails/Python/PHP as one will look down
their nose at the other like he's somehow inferior when they really need each
other. We also need to keep in mind that when you're working on the web
there's no way that you can know all there is to know to create something by
yourself. We need each other. I mean, you could launch a product yourself
having done both design and dev work but to grow and sustain the app you're
going to need specialized people that can fill in your blind spots.

