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Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for

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

#51

Post by ookblah »

Honestly, being a desingineer sucks at times.

The advantages of the "desingineer" is that you cut out a lot of red tape and inefficiencies in the early stages. You can implement things much much faster if you know both front/back and how they come together. IMO, this is crucially important in the MVP/early stages of a startup where you don't have a lot of resources and need to move quickly.

The downside to this (and what I'm slowly figuring out), is that there are limits. It involves a lot of context switching. Someone else mentioned it but it's true... you only have so many hours a day and it's insanely hard trying to become proficient at design, ui/ux, and programming.

What ends up happening is that you "feel" like you're mediocre at everything, and when your startup is growing that feeling SUCKS. I would much rather have a small team where we each specialize (with some overlap of course) in what we can be excellent at.

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

#52

Post by jisaacstone »

gcv wrote: post #42
geekfactor wrote: post #3

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

I think you meant "deingineerketersysadmin." Accounting and janitorial skills always a definite plus.

don't forget db admin! My first startup job I spent more time writing queries than anything else.

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

#53

Post by aspir »

sandieman wrote: post #11
aspir wrote: post #2

Every freelancer in my area is, by this definition, a "Desingineer." I'm in the midwest, so there's almost no other way to get work other than go full stack. Obviously, some are better at the back end and some are better designers, but they have to do it all. Honestly, this reinforces the issue that startups do a poor job of recruiting outside of their 20 mile radius. For example, its early in the office, and I still…

have built a company in the middle of the country as well, and know this freelance type. Typically they are "okay" at design and "okay" at development. They work well for local small businesses but not for startups looking for top caliber design.

I agree with jsavimbi. If you're able to hire specialists, then do it. But, if you're looking to get multiple roles out of the same person, you should be willing to take the pros and cons.

Also, if you're in the situation where you have to hire generalists instead of specialists, you are likely a small business, rather than a high growth startup. If you have a war chest and are looking to scale, it's a mistake not to hire specialists -- you as the business owner should be able to tie everything together, not an employee.

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

#54

Post by DuncanIdaho »

badclient wrote: post #12

you 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

My partner does: UI/UX design, HTML and JavaScript and a dash of backend. I do: backend, architecture, algorithms, sysadmin work and HTML + JavaScript when necessary.

It works really well. We also continuously try to expand to the others territory.

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

#55

Post by _delirium »

I suppose it's a bit of a lost battle in the web space, but I find it weird when the jobs are broken into "programmer/engineer", who does implementation, and "designer", who does UI/frontend stuff. In other areas of engineering, a lot of things other than the final aesthetics, or even just the UI, are called "design"; when you "design" a power plant, that's not purely implementation, but is heavily tied to the engineering. Surely any nontrivial webapp also has that kind of design as well, something more like product design? And it seems like you do want engineers who are also able to do that.

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

#58

Post by mikeryan »

badclient wrote: post #15
alex_c wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interface design. the skill in demand is the latter. to be good at it one needs to be able to be proficient in html, css, javascript, and have basic abilities in whatever server-side technologies are in use. I really don't follow. A kick-ass interface designer can know nothing more than Photoshop. A front-end guru can be terrible at interface design. There's very little connection between interface design and the tec…

There's very little connection between interface design and the technologies used to implement it. For starters, whatever you design in Photoshop typically looks 10-30% different in the browser when converted to HTML. That is significant enough to make the concept look very different than the actual browser interface implementation. An interface designer who only operates in Photoshop thus cannot deliver accurate-loo…

whatever you design in Photoshop typically looks 10-30% different in the browser when converted to HTML

HTML isn't the culprit here. Any design done in a static medium is going to change when actually implemented on a device, for a platform. But it could just as easily be Flash as HTML. Good designers understand and account for the target medium (flexible sizes, variable fonts etc).

Also I reject your initial hypothesis. With a knowledgeable designer's design I can get a pixel perfect HTML implementation. If your design changes 30% just in the implementation then your designer doesn't understand the medium very well.

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

#60

Post by cristianl »

alex_c wrote: post #7
rguzman wrote: post #5

i don't think designers, per se, are that valuable. this line of thought just stems from the conflation of graphic design and interface design. the skill in demand is the latter. to be good at it one needs to be able to be proficient in html, css, javascript, and have basic abilities in whatever server-side technologies are in use. so, yes, these folks will be hard to find. just like any other good engineer, they'll…

interface design. the skill in demand is the latter. to be good at it one needs to be able to be proficient in html, css, javascript, and have basic abilities in whatever server-side technologies are in use. I really don't follow. A kick-ass interface designer can know nothing more than Photoshop. A front-end guru can be terrible at interface design. There's very little connection between interface design and the tec…

I wouldn't devalue graphic design as the parent did. There's room for a lot of improvement in the graphic design — what's often derisively called "just the way it looks" — of most digital products. Graphic/visual designers were somewhat restrained by low resolutions and slow GPUs. Evolving display technology will give rise to better graphic design both in the web and other digital products.

Good interface designers should definitely know the basics of the technologies used to implement their creations, in the same way industrial designers are expected to have some understanding of materials and manufacturing processes. It's often said that designers thrive on constraints: a designer does his best work when he knows the limitations of his tools, and works with their limitations and defects to create something useful instead of pursuing some impossible level of perfection. Designers, too, have to ship, and they ship best when they know what's behind the facade.

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