[counttheforks]

> Developers shouldn't expect themselves to be able to do good design work

Rude. People can learn to do multiple things without being pigeonholed, you know?

> I see so many opportunities in FOSS lost to basic, unnecessary branding and usability oversights.

It's FOSS. Feel free to contribute.

[codexon]

Speaking as someone who was mainly a "developer" for a while, one frequent problem I see from developers is that they assume they can excel at everything because they are good at coding. Since coding is a hard task that not everyone can do well, they think this talent applies to everything else.

Just a few weeks ago on here, there was a developer complaining about not getting any attention through his efforts on social media, and from what he said he did, it was easy to tell he did not know what he was doing and severely lacked the sophistication needed to succeed. Instead of paying for marketing, he decided to do it himself and was about to give up without even thinking about paying someone else to do it.

This is hubris that is commonly seen in developers.

[DrewADesign]

Solid example, thanks. Worth specifically noting that we shouldn't be quick to judge, though. Every one of us has succumbed to novice cockiness at some point in our lives. People who build things, like developers, gain novice-level knowledge of everything from interface creation to domain-specific knowledge to copy writing to photo editing by osmosis. I'd be lying if I said I was any different.

[DrewADesign]

> It's FOSS. Feel free to contribute.

My hours of dev contributions to FOSS projects over the decades are somewhere in the low 5 figure range. Despite having a formal art school design education, I never contribute as a designer because FOSS projects are usually openly hostile to design input, even by someone like me who can implement it themselves.

> Rude. People can learn to do multiple things without being pigeonholed, you know?

Pigeonholing by not expecting specialists to be competent outside of their specialty? I have considerable professional experience as both a designer and a developer in the past decade-and-a-half, and a couple of other completely unrelated careers in the decade before prior. You're fishing for things to be offended by, and probably misjudging the amount of design understanding required for actual competence.

[counttheforks]

If you believe that developers can't do design, then why do you think you can develop?

[DrewADesign]

Having worked as a professional software developer in a reputable development organization for over a decade with steady advancement before I decided to go to school for design is a good enough indicator for me. Being asked to speak at a couple of conferences about my dev work is another good sign I guess.

Suggesting that being a software developer doesn't also qualify you to be a designer seems to have really bothered you for some reason. I don't think saying so is any more controversial than saying automotive engineers aren't automatically car interior designers or that being a civil engineer doesn't automatically make you an architect. If you feel like you're a great designer, fantastic. Enjoy your broad skillset, as I enjoy mine. If you feel like my comment somehow challenged that, weird but sorry?

[counttheforks]

No, it's just amusing how hypocritical you are. You can be a designer and a developer, but nobody else can?

You:

> Developers shouldn't expect themselves to be able to do good design work

Also you:

> Having worked as a professional software developer in a reputable development organization for over a decade with steady advancement before I decided to go to school for design is a good enough indicator for me.

[DrewADesign]

> Developers shouldn't expect themselves to be able to do good design work any more than designers should expect themselves to be able to make scalable, reliable, maintainable, production-ready code.

Reread that sentence. It does not say developers can't do good design work and it doesn't say that designers can't write good code: it says they shouldn't expect to simply be able to do it. Nobody should expect to be able to do anything non-trivial they haven't deliberately learned how to do. Unless you have evidence that most developers have done the years of learning it takes to become a competent interface designer, that's just not a controversial statement.

If you're going to continue trawl my comment for minutia to be aggrieved by instead of making any coherent counterargument, you're on your own.