I’m really curious about the sequel: navigating through the ranks of a tech design Org. I’ve been a Senior SWE at FANG and have considered switching careers t

I’m really curious about the sequel: navigating through the ranks of a tech design Org. I’ve been a Senior SWE at FANG and have considered switching careers to design. My parents fed the family doing photography, I grew up from a design background, even spent a year in fashion design school part-time while I was a programmer at Google. Seeing the politics and the non-objective strifes in the design org at Google, the actual day-to-day of the job seems offputting for me. This is obviously the bias of an engineer who has the privilege of focusing on concrete and mostly objective problems. The vast majority of my friends are designers, tech and non tech, and everyone is strong minded if not outright stubborn. For engineers, the strong mindedness can be resolved through logical arguments. With design a lot of it is intuition and/or unfalsifiable. UX research schools purport to teach quantifying and following the data/user, but the characters I know from design schools always think they know better. I can tell you the designers I met at FANG were data-driven 50/50 of the time. When they were data-driven, it was just confirming their own biases. I’m not saying there is no room for design intuition. That made Apple and it also got Snapchat pretty far, until it didn’t. Also Marissa Meyer era Google and, to some extent, AirBnB with their leaders being designers. But most of the salaried designers I met design out of ego and portfolio building, with service design for users being secondary. It’s arguably a harder incentive problem than with engineers. What’s changed in the tech industry since PG’s Painters and Hackers essay is that design is a lucrative job nowadays, and it attracts art snobs who a generation earlier looked down on engineers as poorly dressed nerds (and they still probably do). There are many aspects of design school such as critique and the self selectivity means some designers are arrogant, but the “niceness” culture of the tech industry forces them to hide it. With this is also a bit of art elitism, and so I’m curious about the journey of a self-taught designer through such ranks, now that actual design departments exist and it’s filled with art-trained designers rather than engineers with design sensibilities.