What salary should a desingineer expect in one of the big cities?
Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
151–160 of 207 posts
Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
#152you should try splitting it into (i) a designer who does HTML, CSS (ii) a programmer and (iii) perhaps even a separate Javascript coder. This is how the company I work for right now does it and it is EXTREMELY inefficient. I've been advocating them to go back to one person to do html/css/js/php. I can see the above work for large orgs. But with a 3-4 person tech team, super specialization has not worked at all
Try ditching your templating language so your frontend guys can work independently.
Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
#153I am a `desingineer` I guess. I'm working on a startup that is taking on big web analytics. A lot of the reusable code is being released as free and open source so that I can focus on the UI. I built the initial front and backend application (now leading a team), the UI, the product plan, and the marketing plan.
https://github.com/analytics-machine
Contact me: tblobaum@gmail.com
Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
#154Engineering 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.…
How interesting. I came from an Architecture background (high school +2 years and University +2 years) and I was decent at it and won a few awards before diving back into computer science (which I did throughout high school) and business (i.e. startups) and became a jack of all trades and then a founder. I can definitely see that my creativity in one area influences the other -- see https://github.com/tblobaum/nodeQuery
Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
#155I 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…
but that it is hard to play both roles on the same project unless you have a lot of discipline. For me it's less of a discipline issue and more of a time issue. Both the backend and the frontend take a lot of quality time to do them right. It's simply not effective to have a single person context-switch between them, even when said person is very good at both. I.e. this is one of the situations where two people can i…
This is the best comment so far, I think, because it highlights why a designer + engineer, even a theoretical 'designeneer' equally skilled at both, isn't necessarily going to be twice as valuable, and in fact may be only as valuable as a single engineer or a single designer.
I believe strongly in the value that knowing both can give you, and for certain classes of small project it's a huge win.
But you're right: context-switching is a limiter. You only have so much free time and mental energy.
For me, I know that I prefer working with competent UX/visual design guidance. I can get some really pretty results from doing my own designs, but it's a wonderful freedom to know that I'll spend 15 minutes in the morning iterating on a piece of paper with a designer today, and then just go away and do my thing. I'll get a PSD that will make the prototype UI more concrete late-afternoon, and the next morning we can talk about how using the UI makes us want to change it.
But if I was doing it all myself? I doubt that even with twice the time, the overall result would be equal, either on the code or the design side.
That designer keeps all of his visual design acumen and photoshop 'muscle memory' loaded into cache.
I keep my emacs key-chords, the code's secret sauce, my bash and git aliases and the topography of staging environments loaded into my cache.
There are definitely projects that exist where you can 'do it all', but ... node.js' model is great for maximizing throughput, but when you've got drastically different types of work, that's what you have multiple cores for. ;)
Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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? Writin…
I'm building small products. Why don't you try that too? If you can build and maintain 2 or 3 products or SaaS, then you won't need to work for anybody else and you'll enjoy double what a developer gets.
In a product, you'll deal with:
- Coding the product back-end
- Doing its front-end and UX
- Writing the documentation. (I like that too)
- Design the landing page (and may be the Interface, if it's too important/creative)
- Marketing, branding and copywriting
- Customer support
- And finally getting some gigs (and you can charge well for them) from time to time
So you get to try everything. There are lot of opportunities on the web, you just need time to grow the ideas and validate them.
Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
#157I wonder how a progsysadmin would compare to the desingineer. I'd imagine it's easier to find a progsysadmin just from my own experience. I've had a few jobs where I was responsible for both the programming and system administration, in small companies of course.
That's more complicated due to the history of programming and sysadmin being more closely intertwined, as you discovered. The first 20 years of Unix were the "systems programmer" domain, having followed the "sales engineer" era of the 60s (speaking roughly here) after the burgeoning computer industry's customer relations functions started getting specialized and split off from nerds. There were many, many more of you 30 years ago.
Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
#158I don't think startups want a desingineer, but rather an expert at one skill (product UI/UX, engineering, marketing) with a pretty decent understanding of a secondary skill area.
For example, I do a fair amount of design work in photoshop etc. I can implement simple front-end stuff. But my co-founder can get complex front-end engineering stuff done 5-10x faster if I just help him pair program it. If I didn't understand code, we'd be unable to do that. Something similar probably to be said about his sense of design since he often ends up giving me really good feedback in the middle of building the page out.
Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
#159Engineering 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.…
Very interesting post!
What I also find fascinating is the way words shape the way we see the world, instead of letting the world shaping the words we use.
I believe that we are creating artificial limits between jobs. Unless you are coding some really complex piece of software, programming is not that hard, at least not as "engineeringy" hard as electrical or civil engineering.
Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe, but requiring both skills to be "great" and "awesome" in order to be anything more than "passable" is a little unfair, no? Are there situations for which "passable" is indeed doing a good job? And yes, it often takes longer to code features than it does to draw and place their UI elements.
My point was that most good coders can implement a designer's UI a lot faster than the UI designers.
For almost all situations I think you are better off getting two developers with complementing skills rather than two jack-of-all-trades that can do "everything". If you can only afford one person then seriously consider how to contract out some tricky parts of the weaker skills to an expert. Then you have a good foundation to build on.