Well, there’s a hell of a lot more false confidence among people who think they can evaluate the merits of a design than designers that do major interface projects not knowing the purpose of what they’re doing. And there are different kinds of designers out there. If you hire a database genius that only has done serious, involved database work, and then add a bunch of front-end web dev work to their tasks because they’re ‘a developer,’ it’s neither an indictment of that developer or developers in general if your web front end is structurally wack. If you hired someone that’s only modified a few existing Wordpress plugins for a green field project, is it their fault or yours if they do a bad job?
The complexity in dev is a lot more obvious than the complexity in design. There’s a big long clear approach to Dunning-Kreuger’s Mt. Stupid with dev work. With design work, the whole idea is to make something that clearly communicates its purpose. That makes a lot of people think they understand what went into it because if it’s done well, the solution should feel ‘obvious.’ Getting something that feels obvious is way more nebulous and convoluted than getting from point a to point B in most dev tasks.
> There’s a big long clear approach to Dunning-Kreuger’s Mt. Stupid with dev work.
Is it really that clear? Or do we just think so because most of us here are devs, while everyone else is thinking “Wow what happened? That codebase was great until suddenly it wasn’t.”
Yes it’s really that clear. The moment non-technical people see code syntax or hear technical jargon, they instantly nope out. That’s why people ask their developer friends and family to fix their computers — they don’t know the difference. It’s all just ‘tech’ to them. It’s also why people toil away at bonkers “no-code” machinations that would have been far simpler with a little more tech knowledge… it’s very intimidating to outsiders. OTOH, far fewer people even know what problems designers are meant to solve, let alone judge the solution, but many think ‘well I have good taste and I’ve worked with designers before’ and confidently wield their broken ideas based on false assumptions.
The complexity in dev is a lot more obvious than the complexity in design. There’s a big long clear approach to Dunning-Kreuger’s Mt. Stupid with dev work. With design work, the whole idea is to make something that clearly communicates its purpose. That makes a lot of people think they understand what went into it because if it’s done well, the solution should feel ‘obvious.’ Getting something that feels obvious is way more nebulous and convoluted than getting from point a to point B in most dev tasks.