Re:Ask HN: Must a Senior Developer be proficient in design, ...
by michaelmior on Sunday March 12, 2017 @04:59PM
(#13853077)
I'm not arguing that's it's not useful to know design if you're working with designers. My comment was just that I think it's reasonable for some developers to want to stick to development. I also think there are plenty of roles available where the lack of desire to learn design isn't a stumbling block.
I do think it is possible to be good at design and development, I didn't say it was impossible. But if you want to keep growing in both, you have to invest time in both. Inevitably this means less time spent on each of the two things individually.
Our "creatives" tend to not know this stuff. Also they don't know other basic stuff about color spaces and typography.
You have to know a certain amount of these things in the webspace so that you can properly head off problems and explain requirements, especially as a senior developer.
More often than not, their "talent" (because they see it as a creative job) is more respected than your magic (because they don't have the faintest concept of what you do). If you're not in a technologhy company and it comes down to your needs or the designers, if you don't know their job too, you're going to lose.
I know all of this design shit, but I'm also a fullstack dev all the way down to the metal. It is possible. I just happened to grow up hacking on a C64, got into designing websites early and then worked in print production and dabbled in video for a while before getting back to software development.