Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for

I have about 14 years into my career as a web guy who can code (front to back), design killer UI and create, execute and grow business strategy.

What that being set! "being" a generalist is not for everyone.

There are some things to note:

1. Keeping up with all three is a LOT of work. Understanding the latest javascript libraries, deployment tech, UI tools and successful business models take a ton of time. I roughly spend 15-30 hrs a week trying new things our, designing or running spreadsheets not to mention the meetups and whatnot.

2. Every startup is looking for this person because they can enable so many parts of the success equation in one, self-contained shot. They add more value per square inch at critical phases of business growth that is a considerable asset. As a startup grows, this is personality turns into an optimal product lead, who can drive major decisions and participate in meaningful discussions with teams, investors and press.

3. Large corporations are not tuned to need or understand your services, unless you are accomplished in mid- to senior-level management positions.

4. You can visualize and eval business ideas quickly, then be able to communicate them to specialists with ease. I can't tell you the number of times being able to verbalized the need for a linked list or onHover whatever has made communcation easier with people who I bring to help me execute. This makes you a better implementer who is respected by counterparts and team members. Business folk quickly grasp CLV and burn margins when deciding to invest or advise.

4. You don't necessarily become an expert in everything. In fact, it's near impossible. I've had to focus of two or three major activities and fine tune my skills. This could mean I will be specializing in the future.

5. You don't get rest. The world is moving quickly, technology even faster. There are millions of able and hungry people willing to execute on their great ideas every single day. That means I have to keep moving or lose my flow. I can probably point to 7 or so ideas that were launched in the time I was evaluating the opportunity with 3 that have gone onto real growth.

Don't see a problem with becoming a generalizing specialist that sees the whole picture from many facets - from marketing, business, coding, design (product, pixel...). A startup needs people being willing to fill these roles and if a said venture is successful (and becomes a business), you can afford specialists, until then, I would expect people to have many roles.

I think I must fit into some super set of this somewhere.

My day job is as a physical product design engineer for a consultancy and have a degree in Industrial Design. So I would do the mechanical and aesthetic design of a product including Injection Moulding, Sheet metal, machining ect. which is not to dissimilar to someone doing the user interface and back-end of the software/web product.

What makes me a little different is that I spend my evenings doing web development and although I have never done it "professionally" I think I am probably allot better than most at the front end development using html, css and javascript (I do like a dash of coffee script). I also have a fair bit of experience with Python on the back end mostly using Django but have also more recently been experimenting with Gevent and web-sockets to do some interesting live updating stuff.

So I suppose I'm a bit of an odd ball, I can't work out how to get both the physical product design and all my interest in web development (front and back end) into one job. I think I will just have to invent a job for myself that does...

EDIT: I guess I'm a web-mech-prod-desingineer...

i'm a designer/engineer and trust me there isn't anything mythical or special about it.

i've been a web/graphics designer for 9-10 years and coder for 3.5 (python at first, but this year i started ruby/rails)

from personal experience i can say almost all creative/visual people are scared of logical/geekish computer stuff ... i was scared and lost at first too but then i realized i'm quite good at architecture and once i put my focus on becoming a better at it things weren't scary any more. my designs improved, my love of internet expanded and i can't imagine doing anything else!

the most important mistake designer make is that they think they need to become REAL "software engineers" like building compilers or even worse thinking they have to master java or C++! (nothing against java, it's just that designer shouldn't start with java or similar programming languages)

for all you designers first learn html5, css3, a bit of javascript and then start with python/ruby (django/rails) and go from there. it's not a 1 night journey, it will take couple of years but it's worth it!