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The Rise of Design Engineers

/ 3 min read

Last Updated:
design, dev, future

TLDR

  1. There is new hot job profile in tech industry and it’s here to stay and probably disrupt the way we build products
  2. Generalist rule and specialization is now for insects

The Inception

The idea of design engineers branched out from the OG quote and now has became the fundamental of how we see the darkspot between design and engineering

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

Into the tech world

One of the tweets that I profoundly cherish on twitter is this one-

This is such a great example of having a complete view of the process of building top quality digital experiences and interfaces. Imagine writing a great tagline for your next landing page, giving it inner shadows, fancy animations. Only to find out you have weird “orphans” in the production version.

You explain this to your frontend engineer, at first your engineer has a hard time understanding what’s wrong, everything looks good, CSS code is just as the design file, all animations works properly. But that bloody weird “orphan”, as a designer you just can’t wrap your head around it. You wish there was a solution. But your engineer coming from a pure technical background says it’s too knit-picking and what you want is just not technically possible. So you coming from pure design background accept it the way it is.

But why design engineers?

Case - 1 Well technically if your designers are great enough to know the inner workings of software development, and vice-versa with developers, GREAT you don’t need design engineers. You have an all-star product team that many companies wish for.

Case - 2 But if that’s not the case with your team, believe me you are going to have a hard time shipping great products. Also, Welcome to the great world of mediocrity. Where two teams work exactly fine but something’s not right when their works merge together.

This is a short digestible definition of design engineers, they serve as the binding glue between the design and technical team. Believe me it all sounds made up until you start seeing the impact of a design engineer, by directly corelating it with the quality of products being shipped.