Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by colmvp 2004 days ago
Some developers on HN have often said they enjoy when Designers know how to code, but it's actually quite hard to get a job as a designer who knows how to develop when you don't have the same coding experience as a pure developer. It's also hard to get a position where the development team trusts you to commit code.

The only reason why I, with a design background, was able to learn frontend (as well as additional topics like design patterns, DSAs, caching, software architecture, optimization, etc.) was because I was lucky enough to find a back end engineer who needed design help and was game to let me take the reigns on that part of the project even when I had zero experience. I mean, holy shit, talk about trial by fire. He tested me with toy projects and then when I showed that I could actually walk the walk, we were off to the races with real client projects. Other companies simply put people like me to do one thing and one thing alone which is... well design.

Realistically, most companies just care about filtering candidates based on x years of experience in Language/Library. Which makes sense, but it also means that pushing the boundaries of your knowledge isn't resume-able until a company allows you to deploy, at which point you can finally say you have 0+i years of ThingYourAreLearning.

1 comments

As a designer who can code you get a job as a Designer who can code.

I've been mentoring a Designer and friend over the last year, and I'm also teaching coding for designers since a short while.

The benefits are quite tangible: As a programmer, you still structure the application, set up the tooling, build the abstractions and the logic, but you're now freed from fiddling with pixels, because the designer has already built his prototypes with implementation in mind, can communicate intent, compromises and solutions for edge cases, and they can also implement a lot of things by themselves, sometimes with guidance. Git is not rocket science either if you give them a clear workflow and resolve issues that are beyond what you'd expect.