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Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for

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

#81

Post by danielmason »

tibbon wrote: post #71

I am a designineer. The problem is that it doesn't make you an expert of all skills. Jack of all trades, master of none. While I took AP CS in high school, I can't rattle off the to O-notation of most algorithms. While I took plenty of art and design classes over the years, I'm no Jony Ives. But, its not about what I can't do in my mind, but what I can do. I learn most things very quickly. I'm decent in Ruby and can…

I suspect the scarcity of your skillset is the main contributor to your relative scarcity of opportunities. At a previous company I helped found, we realized that we were trying to find people who were pretty good designers, front-end developers, and really good on the phone with clients for support stuff. We didn't have the margins to split these into different roles, and that was the insight that allowed me to realize that our revenue model was fundamentally broken. It's not that these people don't exist, it's that you can't design your business around reliably finding them. So maybe you're left with a handful of startups who are able to find a place for you because they recognize your value and adapt, not because they had planned on finding you in the first place.

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

#83

Post by nimblegorilla »

asolove wrote: post #9

I think the problem is not that one person can't have both of these skills, but that it is hard to play both roles on the same project unless you have a lot of discipline. The engineering mindset and the UX design mindset optimize for different things. Even if you are excellent at both, it helps to have someone else forcing you to get the UX right when you're doing the engineering work, and to make the engineering po…

A lot of people can do passable jobs on both roles, but I've never met someone who was awesome on the backend that was also a great UX designer. Likewise, the best designers can whip up a new UI in an afternoon, but it might take them a couple weeks to get it coded.

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

#84

Post by Homunculiheaded »

I was discussing this issue with a friend the other day. I think the real 'why' is there is no motivator to become good at both design and development. Both skills take people who are passionate about what they do, usually to the point where they hone their skills in their free time. I actually think most (good) devs and designers have slight inclinations towards each others work, but it is a serious effort to go from "that does look cool/useful" to professional proficiency. The few people who are currently 'designineers' are mostly likely completely passionate about both (which is their motivator). However for the rest why put in the effort? My understanding is that the pay isn't much different (in fact this sounds a lot like, "wouldn't it be great if I could get 2 for the price of 1"). Easier to find a job? Perhaps, but right now I think good designers and developers are having no trouble finding work. Additionally your skill set is now the target of tons of people looking to get something for nothing, or have one person doing 10 jobs

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

#85

Post by mattmanser »

bigohms wrote: post #41

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…

Are you really? I think it's worth providing examples if you're going to claim you're both a great coder and designer.

As the only link I can find to your work that you've shared so far is this http://cookbuk.com/ (from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2289991)

The design's not bad and avoids most developer designed pitfalls, but it's not great either. HTML wise you've resorted to nested divs, there's errant elements floating in the wrong place and there's also a bunch of commented out code in each html page, which imho is always a massive red flag for me programmer wise. You shouldn't have to comment out code if you're using a VCS.

Obviously this is from 2 years ago, do you have any examples that better show off your skills now?

I'm not trying to pick on you here, it's more that I am honestly interested to see some of your work.

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

#86

Post by zinssmeister »

gruseom wrote: post #64
asolove wrote: post #9

I think the problem is not that one person can't have both of these skills, but that it is hard to play both roles on the same project unless you have a lot of discipline. The engineering mindset and the UX design mindset optimize for different things. Even if you are excellent at both, it helps to have someone else forcing you to get the UX right when you're doing the engineering work, and to make the engineering po…

I find the reason it's hard to do both on the same project is that the engineer by definition knows the internals of the system. It's hard to un-know that and see things afresh from the user perspective. Thus one tends to create UIs that are intuitive to someone who already has a mental model of how the system works, but seem convoluted and arbitrary to everybody else.

if you make sure to build out the UI/UX first and then start coding a feature you can accomodate for this a bit

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

#87

Post by tibbon »

danielmason wrote: post #81
tibbon wrote: post #71

I am a designineer. The problem is that it doesn't make you an expert of all skills. Jack of all trades, master of none. While I took AP CS in high school, I can't rattle off the to O-notation of most algorithms. While I took plenty of art and design classes over the years, I'm no Jony Ives. But, its not about what I can't do in my mind, but what I can do. I learn most things very quickly. I'm decent in Ruby and can…

I suspect the scarcity of your skillset is the main contributor to your relative scarcity of opportunities. At a previous company I helped found, we realized that we were trying to find people who were pretty good designers, front-end developers, and really good on the phone with clients for support stuff. We didn't have the margins to split these into different roles, and that was the insight that allowed me to real…

Your last sentence has been my experience so far. Essentially, when a company gets me, they seem to realize that month that they got more than they expected and its a good thing.

One thing I've noticed about some (not all clearly) people who are very good at one thing (let's say back end programming) is they might not really want to do something totally different. Dealing with customers? Writing documentation? Writing front end javascript? Its a bit like pulling teeth.

I don't mind in the least. Documentation writing is great. Making beautiful products is great. Listening to customers (and investors) is great. And yea, I like coding too!

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

#90

Post by neilk »

namank wrote: post #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 (essentiall…

Jobs was not "only" a visionary. Before Apple, Jobs worked at Atari as a technician. He would get assigned tasks like designing circuit boards. If you consider the early days, Jobs only looks like a business guy if you stand him next to Woz.

Anyway, I think I can say without exaggeration that I'm better than average in both engineering and design. At least for me, I think you have to be born that way -- you get pleasure both from aesthetics, and from solving problems. And when left alone by a world that sees both as separate, you just do your thing.

I started got a computer when I was 11. Other people played games. It seemed completely natural to me to spend almost all my time programming pretty graphics demos.

But how do you get any better? I think you have to be the kind of person who seeks challenges, who seeks a ladder to climb.

For computing, I think we all know that drill. Open source has made it so that you can start anywhere and go all the way to OS development, if that's what you want. You can also get work (even if you have little experience) and use other people's resources to educate yourself.

For design, it's a bit harder. Perhaps I was lucky in that I continually wavered between science and engineering, and design and journalism.

In my teens and early 20s, I was the production/layout guy at student newspapers. So I could educate myself, with thousands of dollars of other people's money, in a way that was almost ridiculously unsupervised. That sharpened my appreciation for typography, photography, design, etc., as well as gave me some experience managing people, budgets and deadlines. But I guess that other people in that role might not have gone as crazy as I did for the design aspect. Especially for the entertainment sections (where design was allowed to be more fun) I was trying to top myself with every single issue that I did. You know that you're doing it right when (a) the bloody thing actually makes printing deadline, week after week (b) you walk around the university and you see people putting your layouts up as a poster.

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