Oh, I’m not a… — Medium

Design is a tough one.

So I took 12 years of piano as a kid. Love playing the piano, although I only play once a week or so, and only play fun songs for an hour or two when I do play.

I do not consider myself playing the piano. I think of it more like "playing at the piano" I understand what a tough art form it is, I am not engaged in structured learning or skill-honing. I am playing. It is a piano. That's about it.

Design, to me, is like that. I have built between 20-40 websites. I love typography. I've laid out a newspaper front page. I've taken all sorts of pictures and love photography. I've even taken pictures for the covers of small regional magazines.

But I still don't call myself a designer.

I think the reason is that, as I learned to play the piano, I learned how to practice -- how to create a mental image of where I wanted my art to go and how to reach it. (Even I spend zero time doing that any more) I understand the art form. With design? Beats the heck outta me. Design is beyond my ken. I've bought all kinds of books on design, I've done many things people would consider design, yet I feel I know as little now (or less) than when I started.

So whether you call yourself a designer or not, beats me what kind of criteria you use. I'm designer in the same way I'm a piano player. It's there, I do it, and I enjoy it. But with design I just don't know enough to know if there's more to it than that, though.

    Recruiter: Do you have any experience with SQL?
    Schmuck: No. I have no SQL.
    Recruiter: Then put "NoSQL" on your resume.

In all seriousness, I actually agree-- to a point-- with the OP. Employers tend toward a denial mentality. "You can't , because you're not a real ." Employees tend toward aspirational claims, at least according to employer suspicion (Theory X). However, many workers (especially programmers) shoot themselves in the foot by buying into this "not a real " nonsense that their bosses shoot at them as an excuse not to think too hard or take employee development seriously. They start to believe in their bosses' negative, limiting opinions of them and get a slave mentality. As an awake person, I say: Fuck That Shit.

You have to be honest, though, especially with yourself. I will certainly describe myself as a "machine learning guy" (I'm averse to the word "expert") on a job interview, but I also know that there is a lot that I have yet to learn. It's at a few months that you get the right to present yourself as "an X guy" on a job interview because everyone does it, and if you grade-deflate yourself you do the world no good, but if you actually believe that you're as knowledgeable as a real expert at that point, then you're delusional.

If you want to call yourself "professional designer" after your app nets you $2.97 (your parents and your grandma) then go ahead, because your bosses-- this is why they are your bosses-- have been using that kind of self-inflation since they were 15 (to pwn girls, while you were studying computers). Just recognize that, in reality, you have a long way to go and there's a lot out there that you haven't learned yet. And if it interests you, then go and learn it.

I personally don't put years of experience in technologies on my résumé. Just add a section for projects and list those smallish projects and what languages you used.

As you do more independent projects with given language it becomes more impressive even if it were only 6 months of experience. If you get an interview and anyone asks how long you've been using the language be honest, but don't offer that until they ask. They may not care.

Ditto here. I'm a software engineer who is capable of improving or tweaking a design as the project requirements change, but I can't do the entire process from conceptualization to visual design. I'm sure with enough practice I could, but to get good enough to say that I'm a designer I'd have to neglect development. And I, quite honestly, like development better.

Really? I know quite a bit about von Neumann algebras (unital weak operator topology closed *-subalgebras of the algebra of bounded operators on arbitrary Hilbert space). It takes about 5-8 years of hard study before you can even begin to understand what this definition actually means.

So, come up to speed in a week please.