Another important point is that the VAST majority of software is not pretty consumer iphone and Rails apps. Some of the products I've worked on have been ugly a

Another important point is that the VAST majority of software is not pretty consumer iphone and Rails apps. Some of the products I've worked on have been ugly as sin, but no company truly cares about that vs. the value gained. Imagine two scenarios: 1) A beautiful designed piece of software that increases company revenues by 10%. 2) An ugly (but same ease of use) piece of software that increases company revenues by 10.1%. Which would you rather use at your company? Do I think design is important? Sure. But to say that "designers are eating engineers" because it's easier now to make a twiiter/instagram mash up is ignoring the multi million line code bases that account for most of the "valuable" software.