
Ask HN: Must a Senior Developer be proficient in design, UX and Photoshop too? - dassiorleando
Had an interview for a Senior Developer position, they ask me if I have Photoshop in my Computer, also told me that I must be proficiency in CMS(Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal, ...) !!!
That it is the definition of a Senior Developer, and the basic is to have these skills after think to do others things else.<p>They also ask me how I&#x27;m going to manage a team with these skills if I don&#x27;t know them well.
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FeatureRush
It sounds like you applied for a senior developer position in some kind of
interactive/digital/marketing agency... Skills you mentioned are required in
that context. It would be different if it was a game dev company or embedded
software shop or fintech software house, but all of them use "senior
developer" as a name of a position.

~~~
dassiorleando
Yes, interactive/digital/marketing agency. And they don't even have a design
team or others things like that. Is it an abuse of languages right?

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FeatureRush
Most small and medium digital agencies I know of use the word "developer" in
that way, as someone who sets up and manages CMS for clients, usually also
doing customizations using stock plug-ins and sometimes writing plug-ins
themselves. Handling all from configuration files, code to looks, UI and even
marketing and photo editing when needed. And I can even tell you of some other
companies that use title developer for people who only configure Microsoft
Sharepoint for their clients, even more in my country people who sell newly
build apartments are also called developers. It is just a word, it is not a
real problem here.

The problem here in my opinion are your missed expectations and how are you
reacting to this situation. I could just tell you "yes, those people don't
know what a developer is" but that will not help you grow.

Looking at the whole thing from my perspective you seem to be very
disappointed that this company did not meet your expectations and perhaps that
you did not meet theirs. It's just a job interview. It's OK. Sorry if they
were unpleasant, but it was their choice and arguing what a true "developer"
really is will not change the outcome. I understand that you are upset, but
what good will come from arguing about agency, that "doesn't even have..." ?
There is not really a right and wrong in this situation, just you and that
company did not fit together, do not think about it as your failure or as them
abusing some kind of universal rule. It may hurt you, because you care, but
really it's just a minor annoyance. A mismatch.

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gibbitz
I'm a Senior Web Developer and I have these skills. I do work in Advertising,
but these skills would help anywhere. I've worked embedded with communications
companies (in a B2C environment) and used these skills, so I wouldn't put this
on Advertising only. Even with silos in an organization it saves time to be
able to export your own missing assets from a comp or to be able to add a
class to an element spit out by a CMS rather than having someone else do it
for you. If you can't do that, I wouldn't call you a senior web developer.
When I was Junior, I remember seeing job postings asking for these skills and
DBA/ Cisco certification/ Desktop support and often those jobs weren't saddled
with the term "senior". I think this post could be seen a bit as a sign o' the
times...

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synthmeat
I'm proficient with most of the tools in designer's toolbox, but when design
is not my responsibility within team, I've found a neat and clean division of
labour between frontend and design - _designer 's output to fronted
implementor is not done if said implementor needs to run any of the tools of
the designer_.

Before you jump to conclusion of how responsibility-avoidant I may be in
frontend role, let me note that as frontend guy I make it explicitly my job to
fully explain limitations as well as opportunities of the medium and give full
specifications of the output needed. This way very few iterations are needed
to maximize both creativity and efficiency of the output.

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techjuice
For a senior web developer for specific content management systems knowing how
to develop sites from scratch for a content management system requires deep
knowledge of the programming language of the CMS, the CMS module and plugin
system and many more skills. It is now expected that you know more than just
the programming language of a content management system in order to be a lead
or senior level developer in the web development world.

These may require the capability on how to design themes for the CMS(Drupal,
Joomla, ExpressionEngine) from scratch or using existing themes or templates,
normally in Adobe Photoshop (splicing, layering, exporting and chopping
everything up for HTML), creating custom modules for the content management
system(deep knowledge of the content management system module build system,
how to interact with external APIs (SOAP, XML-RPC, JSON, etc.), and normally a
bit of system administration skills to move, upgrade and secure a site and
servers from the development environment, to the testing environment and then
to the production environment.

You would normally also have a very good idea (maybe not expert) of how
content delivery networks work, how to scale a high traffic website to more
then one database and web server, the proper changes that are needed to work
behind load balancers, firewalls, etc.

Though with all of these required skills you should also be paid very
handsomely since these are not easily obtained in a short amount of time.

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anngrant
Personally, I'm proficient with most of the tools in designer's toolbox. I use
to work with all CMS , but sometimes I just use ready-made templates like
those from [https://www.templatemonster.com/joomla-
templates.php](https://www.templatemonster.com/joomla-templates.php) website.
They help me save really much time.

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wayn3
Maybe they don't really know what a "software developer" does. Just move on.

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blakesterz
>> They also ask me how I'm going to manage a team with these skills if I
don't know them well.

That's the thing that gave me pause. Is that really a question that should be
asked? If you're a manager you don't need to know your teams skills well do
you? You just need to be a good manager, which is a skill, isn't it? So it
seems like if someone is asking that question, maybe that's not a good sign.
(I very well could be wrong on this, but my experience says I'm right)

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brogrammernot
You should have a base awareness of the tools that your team is using. It's
the same for product managers, which is why some of the best product managers
come from engineering backgrounds.

Do you have to be as good as your team members at their skills? No, of course
not.

Going to be hard to justify hours, timelines and other managerial duties to
the people that you report too as a manager if you don't know if your team is
working efficiently.

Just my two cents.

~~~
dassiorleando
The major problem here is that looks like there are not really a developer
team behind, but just the Senior Developer. No designer and no others person
who make good stuffs on photoshop or others grapic design tools.

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javajosh
The job of a manager is to direct individuals to produce artifacts and
integrate them into a coherent product. The artifacts workers produce are
either _about_ the work (assembly line, inspection), or they _are_ the work
(the sql, classes, functions, objects, scripts, images, and markup that
constitute the _body_ of a working distributed application). The software
body, of course, works within the context of the runtime, which is usually a
distributed, heterogenous process graph connected by well known if equally
diverse protocols. And this doesn't touch the tools that you need to know (in
all their variety), the technical/human processes that help move things along,
the extra runtimes you need to produce real software (e.g. qa, staging), or
procedures for deploying, troubleshooting, and improving running software.

This is a very large amount of knowledge, on top of the core data/algorithms
classical CS education, and it grows even larger when you consider the full
breadth of _alternatives_ when it comes time to structure, build, and operate
a real-world application.

Requiring Photoshop skill of a Sr. Dev is an organizational code smell.
Properly, that role has much bigger fish to fry.

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externalreality
Depends on what you are developing. Right.

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partycoder
Depends on the country but often engineers are more expensive than designers.

It is not cost efficient to have engineers doing design, unless it's for
prototyping.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer_art](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer_art)

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egfx
Development is changing. You have to be proficient in alot of tools, design
tools and CMS's included. If you learn these things. It will just make you
better. A good way to filter out the bad developer btw is too see who bitches
about learning new things.

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michaelmior
This may be true at Startup 2.0 but there are plenty of companies who still
value people with deep development knowledge. While I've met people who are
are skilled developers and designers and they can be incredibly productive and
useful in many contexts, it's not possible to have the same depth of knowledge
when your focus is split.

I agree that developers should always be eager to learn new things, but I
think it's also reasonable for a developer to want to stick to development and
not design.

~~~
busterarm
I guess. I also get a ton of pushback from our design team because some tasks
would be "too much work" that I show them can be done as a batch job in
Photoshop in seconds. And specify the requirements that certain things be
delivered in certain aspect ratios.

Our "creatives" tend to not know this stuff. Also they don't know other basic
stuff about color spaces and typography.

You have to know a certain amount of these things in the webspace so that you
can properly head off problems and explain requirements, especially as a
senior developer.

More often than not, their "talent" (because they see it as a creative job) is
more respected than your magic (because they don't have the faintest concept
of what you do). If you're not in a technologhy company and it comes down to
your needs or the designers, if you don't know their job too, you're going to
lose.

I know all of this design shit, but I'm also a fullstack dev all the way down
to the metal. It is possible. I just happened to grow up hacking on a C64, got
into designing websites early and then worked in print production and dabbled
in video for a while before getting back to software development.

~~~
michaelmior
I'm not arguing that's it's not useful to know design if you're working with
designers. My comment was just that I think it's reasonable for some
developers to want to stick to development. I also think there are plenty of
roles available where the lack of desire to learn design isn't a stumbling
block.

I do think it is possible to be good at design and development, I didn't say
it was impossible. But if you want to keep growing in both, you have to invest
time in both. Inevitably this means less time spent on each of the two things
individually.

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UK-AL
You probably applied to a design agency.

They generally want people with a broad set of skills as opposed to deep.

Developers at software companies usually have deeper knowledge, knowing how to
scale stuff, and building larger projects in a maintainable way.

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imaginenore
I wouldn't say "must", but Photoshop is absolutely the best thing on the
market for image editing.

What's your workflow for creating, say, sprites, if you're not using
Photoshop?

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mattl
Why would a developer be creating sprites? A designer would do that, normally.

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dassiorleando
Exactly.

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edimaudo
I think this would depend on the position. If it was some sort of design
agency then it would not be that much of a stretch.

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skyisblue
A senior developer shouldn't be managing designers, sounds more like a lead or
management role.

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ramenmeal
No. Designers must be proficient in design and photoshop. If you're a dev
working on UI you should have an eye for good and bad design/UX though. No
engineer at a company I've worked for has had those dual responsibilities.

~~~
dassiorleando
I agree with you too ramenmeal, Thanks. I was very confused, then I submitted
it here for more clarifications.

