I'm inclined to believe the same thing. I'm not so much irked by "UX Designers", as they have a seemingly useful role if you consider what they claim. Many of

I'm inclined to believe the same thing. I'm not so much irked by "UX Designers", as they have a seemingly useful role if you consider what they claim. Many of their practices however are laughable at best and rarely accomplish their stated goals. Why should I trust your soft approach to UX? If I'm paying you 70,000 a year, that means you should be providing more than 70,000 a year worth of value - Otherwise theres not really much point in hiring you. Can any UX designer, even in principle, provide more than modest value for sites whose users don't number into the 10s of millions? Keep in mind that its not the difference between no design and a good design when you hire a UX designer, Its the difference between a design generated by someone who isn't a UX professional (but probably is willing to read up on the elements of successful design) and a UX professional who.... possesses no real qualifications or mechanism to distinguish him from the non-UX professional save his assertion that he "has an eye for design". You could hire a High school graduate with an interest in technology, offer to pay him 25k/yr to sit in a comfy chair and write out jquery + html and be absolutely stoked about it, how much more of a value proposition do you get out of a "UX designer"? I want to clarify this isn't a dig against people who truly provide value and make a difference for users - Theres some UX & UI people out there who are changing the face of their businesses by the work of their own hands and their untamable passion for the human enterprise. But those people would have likely kicked ass anyway. So I suppose lastly, I'd be distrustful as a rule of most people who claim to generate value through soft, rather than hard means. Historically you would not be unwise to bet on the success of Mathematics and the failure of subjective analysis in virtually every field ranging from analyzing human emotions to machine translation, even fields traditionally decried for being approached mathematically (Because surely a human can only understand what makes up being human?) have been absolutely revolutionized by using an approach that has been working for the past 10k years of human history - Application of cold logic and lots and lots of hard work. So whats someone who isn't a "science person" to do in an era that increasingly marginalizes those who cannot do hard mental labor? Well you do the only thing you can do with nothing but time on your hands - You market yourself. [P.S - If you want UX/UI people who aren't full of their own shit, a truly excellent ex-coworker of mine - Sam Asante @ http://samasante.com/ http://samasante.com/ is currently looking for a job in San Francisco]