But I have seen a few persons with multiple skills in my career.
Sharing the portfolio of such a guy http://idiode.in . Its really awesome.
Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
201–207 of 207 posts
Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
#202It's funny that this is a thing now. In the early days of the web, being a Designineer was a necessity to get anything done in most web-type companies.
Some will say, "well, you probably aren't on level with a rockstar coder." This is probably true, although my clients are very happy. I can wireframe, design and code a large-scale web app without having to consult a single person (other than the client, of course).
I am starting my own web company now and I am finding that the Designineer badge helps me in great ways. For example, I wanted to quickly create a prototype to show a potential client a better way to go with their website. Normally, in a web company of 5-10 people, this would require consulting a coder, designer and whomever else is involved in the drafting of a project. This could potentially tie up 2/3rds of the company for the possibility of landing a new client. For me, this was all handled inside of a few hours and it makes the company appear more staffed than it actually is.
Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
#203But I have seen a few persons with multiple skills in my career. Sharing the portfolio of such a guy http://idiode.in . Its really awesome.
Quite honestly I wouldn't call that great design.
Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
#204Earlier 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…
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. If you are waiting for somebody else to figure out your worth, you're trying to make them do your job, and it's not gonna work. You have to tell them -- or better yet show them what your value is. That's the only way to sell p…
That's sort of what I was trying to say, except maybe I have a more pessimistic estimation of how many organizations are open to being convinced. Of course you have to sell yourself, but it still matters who's able to buy. Startups may have the most flexibility in this regard.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that's a quibble on my part because your post still gave me an adrenaline shot of motivation to GET OUT THERE and MAKE PEOPLE LOVE ME!
Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 foun…
Really? In the age of DIY MVPs?
Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 engineerin…
If you haven't read it, you may want to check out http://37signals.com/papers/introtopatterns/index. Ryan walks through the process he uses to avoid preconceptions while designing interfaces.
Re: Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
This helps with some of the big, important things. But running a company will present you with a dozen of design challenges. A month. You can't just deal with these all contractually.
It depends greatly on your company.