[knappador]

It's incredibly counterproductive to make statements like in the title. If you need your product to be better in terms of how it looks and feels, you get a UX Engineer and expect them to be able to do data analysis, modify analytics on their own, and apply what's learned from that analysis in dimensions beyond the X and Y in Photoshop.

Reducing a task graph is exactly the role that I'd expect a UX Engineer to be perfect at, and yet the article is titled "Engineers Build Ugly Products" while going on to state exactly the expected benefit of having a UX Engineer deeply involved with the product team -- reduced tasks, focused functionality.

Where this kind of thinking blows back on real decisions is when someone says, "Look, I know how you engineers think..." suffixed by some opinion completely drawn from the realm of speculation. Subscribe to such thinking if you want to arbitrarily override the work of your best modelers.

The absolute worst kinds of push-back are fueled by identity politics statements like these bait into. You wake up in a conversation about prioritizing core value and someone pushes on wanting to change the color of the drapes and calls the entire engineering team anti-design like we don't get anything outside of text-highlighting in our code editors. It's infuriating.

[coldtea]

The key insight you probably miss to understand the article is that it doesn't regard a "UX Engineer" an Engineer.

The fact that the term "UX Engineer" is not even once mentioned in the article is a clear sign that it talks about regular engineers -- technicians and such building a physical product.

And that's OK, the term "UX engineer" is both quite abused and quite recent. Sometimes it's just some ex-designers pretending to be all serious about HCI -- and not any "engineering" with the traditional, robust, sense.