Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by counttheforks 1269 days ago
If you believe that developers can't do design, then why do you think you can develop?
1 comments

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?

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.

> 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.