Speaking from experience, becoming a "good" UX designer has definitely taken me at least 5,000 hours already. In that time, I did plenty - specifically, I made

Speaking from experience, becoming a "good" UX designer has definitely taken me at least 5,000 hours already. In that time, I did plenty - specifically, I made a whole bunch of UIs that, for one reason or another, sucked. In time, the more designs I made, the more I started to develop an intuition for things that worked or didn't work. Not to mention that before I learned how to design, I had to learn how to listen to my users - and before I could do that, I needed to learn to check my ego at the door and realize that even as the "designer", it didn't mean I knew a darn thing about what my design should look like until I talked to them (and sometimes, not designing what I originally "wanted" to design as a result). Yes, there are definitely skills involved in "doing" things that are hard to train, and there's a sense of "natural" talent - but with enough effort, even a computer science major like myself can pick up those skills. And conversely, the hours you spend doing design are hours that are necessarily taken away from other things you want to be an expert on. Like NoSQL databases, or sleep. :)