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Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for

brajeshwar.com

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Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for

#21
Anyone on here have any insights on HOW to get there?

IME, you need certain attitudes towards life to get good at both.

You need to be a visionary AND an engineer. Usually people are one or the other and prefer it because they suck less at it. Hence, they eventually get great at it. But this means the other suffers. To be in the designer+engineer category, you first need to figure out what you are good at (essentially what you spend a large chunk of your time on - dreaming or coding) and then what you are weak at.

Then practice doing the weak thing for a couple of years.

Pretty soon, you are a designeer.

Problem is, in the startup world, I still can't figure out WHY you should be both when you can hire people to complement your weakness. Steve Jobs was obviously only a visionary and he, through practice, became great at it. Dennis Ritchie, an engineer.

Unless, of course, startup is not your endgame. Unless your goal is self-improvement powered by a zesty thirst for knowledge. In my limited knowledge, though Learnado Da Vinci fell into the designeer category, he was still very much an idea person (visionary) than an engineer - mainly because he procrastinated like crazy with his projects (for years, at times). This shows that he preferred conceptualizing the project and loved cultivating the vision rather than actually implement it.

Thoughts? Please give me some feedback, this stuff is important.

Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for

#23
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interface design. the skill in demand is the latter. to be good at it one needs to be able to be proficient in html, css, javascript, and have basic abilities in whatever server-side technologies are in use. I really don't follow. A kick-ass interface designer can know nothing more than Photoshop. A front-end guru can be terrible at interface design. There's very little connection between interface design and the tec…

That's old school thinking right there. I'd never hire a designer who doesn't know front end tech as well or better than they know photoshop. The best designers will know HTML+CSS+Javascript pretty intimately for a variety of reasons.

I'd never hire a designer that valued Photoshop skills above problem solving, design thinking and usability. Photoshop should be just a tool for a designer. I think as that is where the end product usually comes from, it's seen as the skill that you're buying as an employer. Anyone can learn Photoshop, it's extremely simple, it's design thinking that separates the men from the boys.

Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for

#24
There are some out there that can do both but I find it to be very rare (and thus should be highly paid). I have worked with some very artistic people in the past who couldn't code to save their life. I always tell them "you make it look good and I will make it work."

Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for

#25
Something not mentioned, people who are desingineers often gravitate to a comfort zone with regards to money and ability. Let's face it, design is subject to the whims of opinion and can take a really, really long time, code on the other hand usually just works or doesn't.

Dealing with clients on design projects compared to code is like night and day.

Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for

#27

you should try splitting it into (i) a designer who does HTML, CSS (ii) a programmer and (iii) perhaps even a separate Javascript coder. This is how the company I work for right now does it and it is EXTREMELY inefficient. I've been advocating them to go back to one person to do html/css/js/php. I can see the above work for large orgs. But with a 3-4 person tech team, super specialization has not worked at all

What's inefficient about it? Usually this doesn't work if your process sucks. The way I've seen it work well is: Designer starts on the project a week ahead of programmer. Gathers requirements (with the programmer tagging along). Does paper sketches which get a general a-ok from everyone. Does html prototype, ideally already in rails. Hands off to developer, developer wires up. Over time they iterate together on the…

So in your model there is only a designer and a developer? At my work, we have someone for each specialty: 1. design 2. html 3. backend like php 4. js.

Your designer seems to do both (1) and (2) which is more manageable and something I've had work well. Likewise, your programmer seems to do both (3) and (4).

The problems arise when you need to tweak a small feature. You end up needing four-five people(if you count product manager) to touch it to make the change happen. It's not efficient at least for a web start-up(I can see it work for larger enterprises).

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