Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by bigohms » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:52 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #138

bigohms wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt, neither my code nor design will ever match someone who specializes in these areas. So I feel you're kind of missing the point. I never claimed to be a great anything so I wouldn't go jumping to conclusions. I simply do a little of everything. Kudos to your HN detective skills, Cookbuk was a weekend project hacked together playing with CI. Full blast reviews of missing or nested DIVs are a waste of your time tha…

You did say you had killer UI skills. Checking someone's comments and profile takes like 10 seconds. I pretty much check the source HTML of every startup or demo site I see on HN as a matter of professional advancement and to see what they're using. People sometimes put easter eggs in their HTML or headers too, so it's fun too! Or even better when they're not minifying their JS and leave stupid comments in. You'd be…

Wear it in good health.

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

#142

Post by nelsondooley » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 8:15 PM UTC

sbisker wrote: post #108

About six years ago, I decided to become a "desingineer", by accident. Here's how it went down: After getting a BS and M.Eng in Computer Science, everyone was pleased as punched to let me code for them. But I wanted to code and design interfaces as well. What a strange idea - a programmer also making the interfaces. Well, it turned out no one would take me seriously unless I had designed interfaces in a professional…

How do you feel now about the route you took to learn "desingineering"? Would you go about it the same way (school) if you could do it again?

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

#143

Post by rmc » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 8:15 PM UTC

rmc wrote: post #77

jsavimbi wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most startups aren't looking for, and shouldn't be looking for, top caliber design. It costs too much and usually provides no measurable value for an immature product.

It costs too much Simple! Pay 'em less & give 'em equity!

ahem maybe I should have put tags around that. I don't believe in this, burger there are those alas that do.

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

#144

Post by sbisker » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 8:18 PM UTC

moocow01 wrote: post #122

sbisker wrote: post #108

About six years ago, I decided to become a "desingineer", by accident. Here's how it went down: After getting a BS and M.Eng in Computer Science, everyone was pleased as punched to let me code for them. But I wanted to code and design interfaces as well. What a strange idea - a programmer also making the interfaces. Well, it turned out no one would take me seriously unless I had designed interfaces in a professional…

I think in general, being a generalist in any field puts a ceiling on your career path after a while. And like you said the ceiling is not so much about the generalist being mediocre at many things, its more about others getting confused about how you would be best moved up the career track. But the problem with the concept of a career track is that you are on a track defined by other people. I'd say the only way out…

Thats just the thing - while that worked for me working a bit at the forefront of this trend, this doesn't feel like a long term solution. Entrepreneurship != being a desingineer, as the market is clearly showing. A student / aspiring desingineer shouldn't feel forced to start a company too soon simply because we lack the structure to help support that student grow into our industry properly.

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

#145

Post by plugindev » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 8:22 PM UTC

I both agree and disagree with this post.

The age old idea of "do one thing and do it well" certainly works, and it makes sense to hire experts rather than jack-of-all-trades if you can afford it. My team has tried and failed to be a team of generalists in an environment that is very silo'd with a lot of politics and a lot of undirected and uncontrolled customers. Experts counter-intuitively are better to have than generalists in this situation, because experts would have to collaborate and communicate to get the job done; in a team of generalists where each works in a silo, no one has reason to talk with each other unless forced, and this is dangerous if one were to leave, as there would be little familiarity with the application they developed by the rest of the team.

But, on the other hand, this post was about startups. In a startup, it makes more sense to hire good generalists, or to hire someone that is good at one thing, but learns the others. The reasons for this are (1) startups usually lack funds to hire three experts vs. one generalist, (2) fault-tolerance: if you hire two generalists and one leaves, you still have someone that can run development.

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

#146

Post by Periodic » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 8:22 PM UTC

zinssmeister wrote: post #86

gruseom wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is a good idea. I'm going to try to do it on my next project. I don't know if I can stop thinking about the data and implementation. It is just where my mind naturally goes. Someone presents me with some type of data and a way they want to present it and I immediately start thinking about data representation, persistent storage, data abstraction models.

I think more important is just to get out of the engineering mindset and try to think like a user. I bet just sitting down with a non-technical person and working through the UI design would help a lot to keep me from going into my engineering mindset.

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

#147

Post by sbochins » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 8:24 PM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #125

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…

Conway's Law, degenerate case. "Organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations" When the organization structure of a project is 'there's just one guy who does it all', the software architecture will tend towards 'the big ball of code' pattern. However, if the team on a project has people who are engineers, and people wh…

I don't know if I agree with this. It seems like the more people there are working on a project, the more likely you will end up with a complicated ball of code. The reason being is people generally aren't working with the same mental model on the system they are implementing. So, some of the engineers will think its obvious to do things one way, and others will do the opposite. It doesn't make sense for complete rewrites when the other engineer reviews the code, so you end up with inconsistencies in the code. At that point there is no real way to look at the code in a coherent fashion. It doesn't completely make sense to the first or second engineer. It has become a complicated ball of code.

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

#148

Post by sbisker » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 8:26 PM UTC

nelsondooley wrote: post #142

sbisker wrote: post #108

About six years ago, I decided to become a "desingineer", by accident. Here's how it went down: After getting a BS and M.Eng in Computer Science, everyone was pleased as punched to let me code for them. But I wanted to code and design interfaces as well. What a strange idea - a programmer also making the interfaces. Well, it turned out no one would take me seriously unless I had designed interfaces in a professional…

How do you feel now about the route you took to learn "desingineering"? Would you go about it the same way (school) if you could do it again?

It would be amiss to separate my own academic influences from my desire to return to school - there were a few Ph.D applications in there along the way :) It is also entirely possible that as someone interested in such theoretical things, my career has subconsciously drifted to a road less traveled.

Indeed, this post was not meant to be bitter - and I think I would do it again - but it was meant to point out that the longer we take to pin down a definition, the more out of control it will get. I have half a mind to start some sortof of "Desingineers Association" to help get this solidified, in much the same way the Interaction Designers Association was so crucial for solidifying that movement in the late 2000s. Thoughts on that would be appreciated.

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

#149

Post by pgisstilladink » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 8:32 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #126

They're not entirely mythical. I was this person for Viaweb, and YC has funded several founders who are both hackers and designers.

What a surprise to see you here promoting yourself and your snake-oil yet again. Teach these youngsters once more about how much money they can make if they just recognize how smart and talented you are! You disgust me.

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

#150

Post by dgabriel » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 8:41 PM UTC

jpdoctor wrote: post #38

geekfactor wrote: post #3

This is wrong. Everyone knows that modern startups are looking for a Desingineerketer.

Sir, you are mistaken: We are in the market for a Desingineerketertesteraccountant. (Is this how German got started?)

My beloved was a German major once upon a time, and he assures me that this is exactly how German got started... or at least it's how German works.