[HPBEggo]

From experience, I would say that a very good designer is worth considerably more to a company than a very good developer.

This comes largely from the fact that the beneficial cap in skill for designers is much higher than for developers.

With a developer, so long as they finish everything on time and it works as intended, other concerns are largely irrelevant.

With a designer, there is always room to improve, so the difference between the best designer and the next-best designer still provides some important benefits, while this is not necessarily true for developers.

[blindhippo]

Until it comes to maintenance time and you discover that your cadre of less then stellar developers has created a "works as indented" pile of excrement that is largely unmaintainable. Then the difference between the best developer and the next-best is no longer irrelevant.

In my experience, design is undervalued in most software projects, but the sentiment expressed in this article is beyond over-correction.