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> 90% of PR and Web/UI/UX people could be safely fired after a couple of interactions of the design (and brought back 3-5-7 years later when the new or re-desig

> 90% of PR and Web/UI/UX people could be safely fired after a couple of interactions of the design (and brought back 3-5-7 years later when the new or re-design would be needed). Sitting and not doing anything would make them fired, so they invent "new", "innovative" and other bullshit named things to justify their pay. Isn't this most positions and just people in general, in some capacity? Business and sales pushing for new features that no one necessarily needs. Back end devs padding their CVs with hot tech and often doing refactoring for the sake of refactoring. Front end devs adding more bloat for marginal visual gains and messing with the UI/UX. DBAs mucking about with indices which will either improve or worsen things when the DB is performing adequately already. Ops pushing for using new industry practices which will probably introduce undue complexity into the mix. QA being overly nitpicky about bugs or even visual flaws that no one will ever even run into or notice. Security complaining about supposed CVEs that automated scanning picked up, but that cannot realistically be exploited. Humans are pretty curious by nature and like to feel like they're doing a good job, so i can't help but to feel that it's turtles all the way down, regardless in which direction you look - everyone will be trying to follow industry trends and not miss out, keep their skills relevant or just do anything to justify the existence of their own position.

justsomehnguy 5y ago
> Isn't this most positions It is. Thing is, technical positions (compared to 'artistic') have the means to show the proof of work, though sometimes it requires 'translation' to manglement-speak and they are not immune from 'I can't see|touch you work - means you are not needed'. Creative positions... they literally show the [finished] product, and in our sphere it is usually seen immediately - you can't imitate redesigning the home page of yoursuperbank.com, or spend months on it. But while DBAing, administrating or securing is a never ending process, re/designing is a process with a clearly (well, usually) defined finishing line. So if you want the paycheck - you need to sell the dire need to tweak fonts every couple of months.
- KronisLV 5y ago
  That's an interesting distinction to make! That said, i don't entirely agree with all of it: > So if you want the paycheck - you need to sell the dire need to tweak fonts every couple of months. You could say the same about addressing technical debt. Or introducing containers. Or a service mesh, or another form of service discovery, load balancing, circuit breaking. Or refactoring your old code. Or adding more tests, or more kinds of tests (e.g. chaos engineering, or even browser automation tests). Or clustering your database, or maybe sharding it. Or rewriting your software in Rust, for stretching this argument a bit further. Many products out there could be considered "finished" in their current form, maybe only apart from security updates which need to be constant (to address things like Log4shell), or maybe scaling them (though that shouldn't always require constant rewrites, short of a very optimistic growth scenario). For example, if Skype's development stopped 5 years ago (or before whenever the last redesign happened and new features were added) and it remained "stable", the world wouldn't be any worse of a place or even the product worse off than it is now, at least in my eyes. Of course, many say that it's largely dead and has been displaced by the likes of Zoom or Teams which is perfectly fine albeit probably not very relevant to the discussion - it's not like their updates seemed to help them much in this regard.
  - sizzle 5y ago
    Hey there, read my comment above this to the person you are quoting. Let me know what you think! Thanks for calling this person out. UX =\ UI
- sizzle 5y ago
  Have you ever heard of the field of HCI? Human Computer Interaction was born out of Human Factors, and understanding user behavior through a mixed methods approach i.e. quantitative and qualitative research to understand human behavior. You are reducing this whole academic field that produces UX designers with the like of UI/visual/graphic designers who never studied or learned how to evaluate designs and study how people use designs (usability testing), which would TRIVIALLY catch and solve the issue in the OP of a severe usability issue with the V11 Tesla UI redesign. A lot of time design is outsourced to low grade ux designers in other countries who start with design and never test anything in my experience, Accenture, TCS, etc. that churn out these usability design disasters. If the team is in house, then they aren’t running a legit UX research practice, just focused on aesthetics, minimalism, and cool factor of Tesla in-house and I will bet you money their resume is visual/UI design heavy and HCI is not even mentioned. UX =\ UI, and you have proven that this misconception still exists and we need to try harder as an industry to call out the dilettante UX teams who are really UI designers faking it to command a higher salary without doing the real hard work to understand user behavior and test designs for usability issues, etc.
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    I think that the UI/UX conflation is inevitable, as developers should have skills in both areas, similarly to how DevOps is becoming more and more popular (though it also has its opponents). I'd argue that being able to write your code but not knowing how it runs isn't entirely viable, since one might influence the other - same goes for UI and UX. Both should be considered, even if i'd prioritize UX above UI. > You are reducing this whole academic field that produces UX designers with the like of UI/visual/graphic designers who never studied or learned how to evaluate designs and study how people use designs (usability testing), which would TRIVIALLY catch and solve the issue in the OP of a severe usability issue with the V11 Tesla UI redesign. Apart from bringing shortcomings in our educational systems to light (e.g. the pace at which the industry moves ahead and the inability of many academic programs to keep up with it), i'm not sure i can agree with the entirety of the argument, because it almost reads like the "No true Scotsman" argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman Should more academic knowledge be applied to the industry? Sure! But since that's clearly not happening, it's useful to explore why that is: in my experience, much of the academic research and ideas (model driven development in particular or many approaches to testing software come to mind) never find their way to being applied in the industry, don't get turned into viable products or even practices. Thus, i'd say that it's not like this academic field is maliciously being reduced in that argument - it has simply failed to make itself relevant as a whole, one that would be worthy of consideration (even if it should). That's how we get these UX messes. Sure, one can talk about outsourcing and how these consulting companies are responsible for the end results, but the blame also lies in the businesses who don't want usable software in 5 years but good enough software in 1 year. Can you really blame them for trying to remain competitive and cutting out all of the non-essential factors just to be the first to market and be able to iterate quickly? I think i can, so perhaps it's useful not to blame some underpaid person who's under the pressure of made up deadlines, but rather the company that wanted to go down this path (both the client and supplier), as well as the whole economic system as a whole. In my eyes it's not that dissimilar to how everyone wants to hire experienced devs, yet no one wants to invest in new devs. The tone in your comment rubs me the wrong way, maybe because it seems like gatekeeping or elitism. Clearly if the industry was better aligned with sustainability and a friendly approach to HCI, these good patterns would emerge naturally: if a compiler can point out problems with code or plugins do the same with code style, or even Lighthouse tell you about potential improvements to the page structure, why don't we have the same for accessibility and everything else? Just look at Flutter, something that was touted as a great advancement in interface design, yet breaks not only screen readers (at least up to recently), but also cripples basic browser functionality like right clicking: https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/ https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/ Look at "The Website Obesity Crisis", a trend that plagues the entirety of the industry and seems to be like the front end equivalent of the Wirth's law: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm (which also coins the term "Chickenshit Minimalism", as funny as it is) I don't think the solution here is to point fingers at one another and to claim that person X isn't a true developer because they didn't ignore the economical climate that they are in to pursue creating the perfect UX, or that person Y doesn't fit the criteria either because they didn't rewrite their codebase in Rust with 100% code coverage, or even that they didn't attend an academical institution for an arbitrary amount of years. As someone with a Master's Degree in CS with the added qualification of a Programming Engineer, i feel like a lot of the things that i learnt were due to my own initiative and caring about it all, rather than some formalized study course. And even so, i sometimes find myself making tradeoffs or sub-optimal choices (albeit well described ones and clearly logged as technical debt) because i enjoy having food on the table, so to speak. I think we should start with the realization that many industry trends are actively harmful, that you can only work against them in a limited capacity and have to make the best of it: http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks Disclaimer: not downvoting your comment, because while i disagree with a part of your argument, i think it's worthy of discussion.
- numpad0 5y ago
  Another possible explanation I can think of is that UIUX products are bundled and rushed out for the maximum effect. There are rarely a literal "all-new" hardware product, and there are multiple models for each manufacturers, but websites and UIs are always all-all-new with no staggered releases.

justsomehnguy 5y ago

> Isn't this most positions It is. Thing is, technical positions (compared to 'artistic') have the means to show the proof of work, though sometimes it requires 'translation' to manglement-speak and they are not immune from 'I can't see|touch you work - means you are not needed'. Creative positions... they literally show the [finished] product, and in our sphere it is usually seen immediately - you can't imitate redesigning the home page of yoursuperbank.com, or spend months on it. But while DBAing, administrating or securing is a never ending process, re/designing is a process with a clearly (well, usually) defined finishing line. So if you want the paycheck - you need to sell the dire need to tweak fonts every couple of months.

KronisLV 5y ago
That's an interesting distinction to make! That said, i don't entirely agree with all of it: > So if you want the paycheck - you need to sell the dire need to tweak fonts every couple of months. You could say the same about addressing technical debt. Or introducing containers. Or a service mesh, or another form of service discovery, load balancing, circuit breaking. Or refactoring your old code. Or adding more tests, or more kinds of tests (e.g. chaos engineering, or even browser automation tests). Or clustering your database, or maybe sharding it. Or rewriting your software in Rust, for stretching this argument a bit further. Many products out there could be considered "finished" in their current form, maybe only apart from security updates which need to be constant (to address things like Log4shell), or maybe scaling them (though that shouldn't always require constant rewrites, short of a very optimistic growth scenario). For example, if Skype's development stopped 5 years ago (or before whenever the last redesign happened and new features were added) and it remained "stable", the world wouldn't be any worse of a place or even the product worse off than it is now, at least in my eyes. Of course, many say that it's largely dead and has been displaced by the likes of Zoom or Teams which is perfectly fine albeit probably not very relevant to the discussion - it's not like their updates seemed to help them much in this regard.
- sizzle 5y ago
  Hey there, read my comment above this to the person you are quoting. Let me know what you think! Thanks for calling this person out. UX =\ UI
sizzle 5y ago
Have you ever heard of the field of HCI? Human Computer Interaction was born out of Human Factors, and understanding user behavior through a mixed methods approach i.e. quantitative and qualitative research to understand human behavior. You are reducing this whole academic field that produces UX designers with the like of UI/visual/graphic designers who never studied or learned how to evaluate designs and study how people use designs (usability testing), which would TRIVIALLY catch and solve the issue in the OP of a severe usability issue with the V11 Tesla UI redesign. A lot of time design is outsourced to low grade ux designers in other countries who start with design and never test anything in my experience, Accenture, TCS, etc. that churn out these usability design disasters. If the team is in house, then they aren’t running a legit UX research practice, just focused on aesthetics, minimalism, and cool factor of Tesla in-house and I will bet you money their resume is visual/UI design heavy and HCI is not even mentioned. UX =\ UI, and you have proven that this misconception still exists and we need to try harder as an industry to call out the dilettante UX teams who are really UI designers faking it to command a higher salary without doing the real hard work to understand user behavior and test designs for usability issues, etc.
- KronisLV 5y ago
  I think that the UI/UX conflation is inevitable, as developers should have skills in both areas, similarly to how DevOps is becoming more and more popular (though it also has its opponents). I'd argue that being able to write your code but not knowing how it runs isn't entirely viable, since one might influence the other - same goes for UI and UX. Both should be considered, even if i'd prioritize UX above UI. > You are reducing this whole academic field that produces UX designers with the like of UI/visual/graphic designers who never studied or learned how to evaluate designs and study how people use designs (usability testing), which would TRIVIALLY catch and solve the issue in the OP of a severe usability issue with the V11 Tesla UI redesign. Apart from bringing shortcomings in our educational systems to light (e.g. the pace at which the industry moves ahead and the inability of many academic programs to keep up with it), i'm not sure i can agree with the entirety of the argument, because it almost reads like the "No true Scotsman" argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman Should more academic knowledge be applied to the industry? Sure! But since that's clearly not happening, it's useful to explore why that is: in my experience, much of the academic research and ideas (model driven development in particular or many approaches to testing software come to mind) never find their way to being applied in the industry, don't get turned into viable products or even practices. Thus, i'd say that it's not like this academic field is maliciously being reduced in that argument - it has simply failed to make itself relevant as a whole, one that would be worthy of consideration (even if it should). That's how we get these UX messes. Sure, one can talk about outsourcing and how these consulting companies are responsible for the end results, but the blame also lies in the businesses who don't want usable software in 5 years but good enough software in 1 year. Can you really blame them for trying to remain competitive and cutting out all of the non-essential factors just to be the first to market and be able to iterate quickly? I think i can, so perhaps it's useful not to blame some underpaid person who's under the pressure of made up deadlines, but rather the company that wanted to go down this path (both the client and supplier), as well as the whole economic system as a whole. In my eyes it's not that dissimilar to how everyone wants to hire experienced devs, yet no one wants to invest in new devs. The tone in your comment rubs me the wrong way, maybe because it seems like gatekeeping or elitism. Clearly if the industry was better aligned with sustainability and a friendly approach to HCI, these good patterns would emerge naturally: if a compiler can point out problems with code or plugins do the same with code style, or even Lighthouse tell you about potential improvements to the page structure, why don't we have the same for accessibility and everything else? Just look at Flutter, something that was touted as a great advancement in interface design, yet breaks not only screen readers (at least up to recently), but also cripples basic browser functionality like right clicking: https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/ https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/ Look at "The Website Obesity Crisis", a trend that plagues the entirety of the industry and seems to be like the front end equivalent of the Wirth's law: https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm (which also coins the term "Chickenshit Minimalism", as funny as it is) I don't think the solution here is to point fingers at one another and to claim that person X isn't a true developer because they didn't ignore the economical climate that they are in to pursue creating the perfect UX, or that person Y doesn't fit the criteria either because they didn't rewrite their codebase in Rust with 100% code coverage, or even that they didn't attend an academical institution for an arbitrary amount of years. As someone with a Master's Degree in CS with the added qualification of a Programming Engineer, i feel like a lot of the things that i learnt were due to my own initiative and caring about it all, rather than some formalized study course. And even so, i sometimes find myself making tradeoffs or sub-optimal choices (albeit well described ones and clearly logged as technical debt) because i enjoy having food on the table, so to speak. I think we should start with the realization that many industry trends are actively harmful, that you can only work against them in a limited capacity and have to make the best of it: http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks Disclaimer: not downvoting your comment, because while i disagree with a part of your argument, i think it's worthy of discussion.
numpad0 5y ago
Another possible explanation I can think of is that UIUX products are bundled and rushed out for the maximum effect. There are rarely a literal "all-new" hardware product, and there are multiple models for each manufacturers, but websites and UIs are always all-all-new with no staggered releases.