Great designers have a bunch of skills. Content strategy, interaction design, information architecture, user research, typography, etc. Where does "great devel

Great designers have a bunch of skills. Content strategy, interaction design, information architecture, user research, typography, etc. Where does "great developer" sit. Can you have an individual who is genius level at operations, scaling, databases, machine learning, front-end development, game AI, automated testing, etc. etc? Nobody, or only a very, very, few extraordinarily talented individuals, are great at everything in development. Ditto for design. People have preferences and specialities. Why not pick from both baskets? Design and development are both complicated. However, in some places (e.g. figuring out what people need, requirements gathering, etc.) they are complicated in the same kind of way. In other places (spotting patterns, simplifications, etc.) they involve similar sorts of skills. The real problem is with the labels "designer" and "developer". They're not "real" things. They're reifications. They're arbitrary labels we apply to certain communities of practices. I'm very happy in my career and skillset - which involves chunks from the dev camp and chunks from the design camp. I'm not a unicorn. I don't know everything. My visual design skills are pretty lousy for example. But I am expert in some things in both design and development. Like the OP I find that there is often a synergy between those skill sets. Some bits from my "design" world make me a much more effective developer. Some bits from my "developer" world make me a much more effective designer. The split between the domains is a false one IMHO - and fortunately many more folk seem to be realising that.