I'm an engineer turned designer turned product manager (and sometimes backwards). Keeping yourself open to learning new skills is a growth opportunity that's si

I'm an engineer turned designer turned product manager (and sometimes backwards). Keeping yourself open to learning new skills is a growth opportunity that's silly to shut down in general. So the real question is given your life goals, would the set of skills that generally constitute design be valuable ones learn. Specifically, here's some common goals for programmers and how design helps them in it: - Entrepreneurship: Design is a lot of understanding human psychology. This helps you communicate in talking, documents, better pitch decks, recruiting effectively - Senior IC/Techical Leader: You can write more clearly, make great presentations that effectively train others, get buy-in more efficiently from management, be blocked less often by designers. - Engineering Management: So much people work here. Empathizing, creating effective feedback loops with your reports and peers (design teaches you a ton about the value of feedback loops and how to create them), presentations, effective writing. - Individual Hyperproductive Programming: You learn to understand yourself as a user better. I found that after becoming a designer, I optimized my editor to create the best possible user experience for me, wrote better tests, etc. Most good programmers implicitly do this, but having the vocabulary for how to think of yourself as a user, collect feedback, understand the visual elements that drive your interaction with your tools is massively helpful. - Product Management: Docs, slides and the usual. Importantly, leading teams of designers and engineers is much easier if you understand their craft well. The code skills training as a designer made me much better at was feedback loops, understanding human psychology, visual and auditory cues to trigger certain reactions, hierarchy and organization, and many more. It's totally possible you learn these from different experiences in life, but there's lots of value in these skills for most goals programmers have.