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I think the more overlap in understanding—better delivery teams perform. That doesn't mean product designers are writing production code or engineers are tweaki
by samsolomon 4y ago
I think the more overlap in understanding—better delivery teams perform. That doesn't mean product designers are writing production code or engineers are tweaking designs. But it does mean that designers understand limitations and consistency, while engineers understand what the general experience should feel like. I think that leads to a pretty tight feedback loop where things can be iterated on quickly and there's not a lot of noise with arguing about what's possible or not.
- ethbr0 4y agoBingo. The most effective PMs / designers / managers I've worked with as a software engineer spent their energy learning high level technical limitations. What's order-of-magnitude easier; what's harder. It's difficult to learn because it's experience-based listening and intuiting, without any books that I know of, but it provided a greater boost to team productivity than their learning nuts-and-bolts details.
- krm01 4y agoExactly this
- magicalhippo 4y agoThis applies for most things though. For example, when I got hired at my current place, I didn't know anything about the domain. The more I've learned about the domain the better code I write. Knowing the domain allows me to make informed decisions, discover potential issues etc, rather than just blindly follow some spec.
- Mezzie 4y agoThe main problem is that anyone who can do both is highly incentivized to go into engineering/coding instead of product design. The pay and respect are usually much better. So then that pool is limited further to people who can design and code well, prefer design, and don't need/want extra money. Then add on to that our current work culture prefers specialists to generalists: HR and exec teams will hire a product designer with 5 years of design experience and no coding over someone with 2 years of design experience and 5 years of software engineering experience.
- Foreignborn 4y agoI don’t find this to be the case. I’m a senior designer at a FAANG and chose this over being a SWE. And nowadays, the salaries are very competitive between pm, design and eng. When I was earlier in my career it was a major struggle to stop coding. every place out of university would say there was some kind of design opportunity for me, but then I’d find myself implementing mine and other designers features. I’m glad that’s over. Anecdotally, I’ve met several eng -> PM and Eng -> design transfers, probably all possible to the leveling of pay and prestige.
- Mezzie 4y agoI stand corrected! Thanks.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- samsolomon 4y agoI’ll second Foreignborn’s comment. I potentially could have gone the engineering route. I chose product design mostly because I enjoyed it more and felt like I was a stronger designer than engineer. I don’t see much difference in pay or respect. I suppose it depends on the org and whether product design is strategic though.