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

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

#131

Post by bad_user » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:00 PM UTC

geebee wrote: post #129

I'm coming a little late to this discussion, but I do think that as much as startups want "desingineers", the hiring process makes it very unlikely that they will ever get one. I remember reading Scott Adams's advice on how to get into the top 1% (well, reallu the top .0..1%). One way is to be incredibly good at one thing - like Roger Federer. The other way is to keep combining interesting and related things until yo…

There is a third option that is more accessible than building your own products - consulting.

Clients seeking consultants have different interviewing tactics, even though the clients themselves have an engineering background. A good consultant is too expensive / too busy to be asked about detecting loops in linked lists or about how many balls can fill a bus. Therefore for a consultant references and a portfolio are what's taken into account.

And these can be built through hard work. At first you could build something for demonstration purposes and open-source it. Or you could work on a project pro-bono. Of course, consulting requires good marketing skills - but we are talking about generalists here.

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

#132

Post by c4urself » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:00 PM UTC

since when does a designer do html/css/js? or am i confusing a designer with a front-end dev?

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

#133

Post by tedkimble » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:07 PM UTC

thinker wrote: post #103

tedkimble wrote: post #72

Engineering and designing are much more similar than they are different. I recently completed a four-year graduate design degree (architecture) after a lifetime of math, physics and not a whip of art or design experience. Here's my take on this issue. Engineering and design are both fundamentally processes of creation. While both creations must meet one or more objectives, the types of those objectives often differ.…

I'd love to read your thoughts on this as a blog post - do you have one?

Thanks for the encouragement. I'm in the process of two related posts, but they're not quite finished.

One is on my master's thesis and how a design can actually be the result of a complex dynamical system. The other is on the process of navigated a design state space during the web design process.

I'll be sure to post both here when they're completed.

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

#134

Post by its_so_on » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:13 PM UTC

the key to this post is here:

"They’re doing something on their own, are already kicking ass and are not available."

It's not that they can't use an extra $10k per month. They most certainly are available.

They're not available at 'speculative, "startup" wages' with unknown prospects even if you get them on board with a token amount of equity and even if you get funding.

They can do it all, and are doing it successfully. They don't need you.

So what? I don't need Google, I don't need Microsoft, I don't need IBM. These companies would hire me by putting some money on the table.

The key to the 'desingineer' is that, you know, they don't really need you. One of your skills (the person looking for a desingineer) is putting the pieces together, finding the people and getting them on board, none of whom can singly do everything. So, they need you.

THe desingineer doesn't need you. If you want them on board, you're going to have to actually open your pocketbook. Imagine that.

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

#135

Post by modoc » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:18 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #130

moocow01 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Entrepreneurs that are engineers and don't have a designer as a cofounder have no choice but to become desingineers. Generalists are considered to be mediocre (jack of all trades, master of none). I don't know why though - maybe it's because many developers calling themselves specialists in a domain are doing the same thing for 5-10 years in a row and it's scary when other people take a different path.

The obvious other choice is to hire a designer or a design firm as needed (or depending on what you need, buy a design template to get you going).

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

#136

Post by pbiggar » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:36 PM UTC

I think a lot of this depends on what you mean by "backend". Personally, I need a designer who can write the frontend. That means HTML/CSS, but it also means JS (because what is a web app without JS these days). More importantly, it means being able to work directly on the app without hand-holding - for example, knowing where the CSS goes in a Rails project and being able to work on it directly.

I wouldn't expect my designer to write a sorting algorithm, or a web crawler, or anything that's more code-y, but HTML/CSS/JS and the frameworks which hold them are part of the toolset.

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

#137

Post by pardner » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:41 PM UTC

mikeklaas wrote: post #119

Just find a former technical founder that was by necessity forced to learn all these skills. That's how I became solid (but not expert-level) in distributed systems, machine learning, web development, UX/UI design, and app dev. Even for large teams, having people who have a deep understanding of all areas of work is underrated.

Bingo. As soon as possible after building a product that starts getting traction I build teams of people who are far better than me in every relevant discipline who can sprinkle true awesomeness on their respective areas. From that point my "deep understanding of all areas" (as you put it) gives me the judgment to lead the team as we relentless prioritize efforts in the individual aspects of the whole product. That skill set was valuable at least through the IPO, twice.

Even before I started my own companies I was a product manager at a large company, and groking the hardware, software, UX, manufacturing, and marketing aspects of the product gave me uncommon influence with the real experts in each of those domains -- because I had and could communicate that end-to-end vision of what was possible.

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

#138

Post by mattmanser » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:42 PM UTC

bigohms wrote: post #120

mattmanser wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 elem…

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 surprised about how much someone's HTML can tell you about them.

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

#139

Post by geebee » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:46 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #131

geebee wrote: post #129

I'm coming a little late to this discussion, but I do think that as much as startups want "desingineers", the hiring process makes it very unlikely that they will ever get one. I remember reading Scott Adams's advice on how to get into the top 1% (well, reallu the top .0..1%). One way is to be incredibly good at one thing - like Roger Federer. The other way is to keep combining interesting and related things until yo…

There is a third option that is more accessible than building your own products - consulting. Clients seeking consultants have different interviewing tactics, even though the clients themselves have an engineering background. A good consultant is too expensive / too busy to be asked about detecting loops in linked lists or about how many balls can fill a bus. Therefore for a consultant references and a portfolio are…

That's a really good point, and reminds me of some thoughts I had last time I was at the white board explaining the difference between composition and inheritance. I was irritated as crap to be doing it, but I also realized that my irritation should be with myself. Even if I'm not a rock-star programmer with huge contributions to open source, I should, by this point, have a body of work that speaks louder than a technical interview.

Part of the problem is that many programmers still don't get to do open source work (I couldn't have revealed the source code to what I was working on at the time in an interview), whereas many other fields (design in particular) provide more opportunity to show off your work publicly. But there is a choice here, and as you've pointed out, it's important to make sure that at least some of your work is publicly available.

Even "demo" sites don't strictly need to be demo anymore - a small "real" app can be created, deployed, and used, even if the main purpose was to show off skills.

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

#140

Post by Nat0 » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:49 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…

This sounds very similar to my experience, just starting with design first and then delving into programming to gain more control over the finished product. I knew that this would be a great combination to have considering how frequently a product breaks down in the communication between programmers and designers.

However, right now I am debating which direction to go in since it has a mess trying to get anyone to take me seriously without being 100% designer or 100% programmer.