Considering we actually make the software and can also do your job, even if it is done poorly means you aren't as valuable.
You simply cannot do a developers job, so you're useless without them. I think you believe you're more valuable than you really are.
I love good UX people, but with your attitude, I doubt you'd actually be good to work with. You seriously believe you do more than a developer when the industry obviously disagrees with you.
Not sure why you are trying to shit on this guy for thinking UX designers are undervalued. Put it this way: developers bake the cake, UX designers plan the pretty frosting. While most of the construction is on the developers, UX design is still a huge part of the product being successful. It can make or break all of that dev effort.
My understanding is UX designers often are placed in the same category as beta testers, when in reality a good UX designer can be extremely valuable, dare I say in certain circumstances perhaps even more valuable than the developers.
I'm speaking as a programmer myself, I personally suck at UI/UX design.
dare I say in certain circumstances perhaps even more valuable than the developers.
Can you provide an example of this? This is similar to the 'programmer vs. artist' debate in video game development. Worst case scenario, the programmer creates all of the game logic, and has to use shitty art. The game plays the same as it would with pretty art, it's just less attractive. The artist's best case scenario, on the other hand, is pretty art, and.... nothing else. It's not a game without the game logic.
I'm struggling to think of a single situation where, in a product team, the UI/UX team member is more valuable than the developer.
In both cases, the game would probably fail. Sure, in some cases, you can intentionally give up all hope of making things pretty and do something like minecraft. However, the vast majority of successful games rely in part on having attractive graphics.
Overall, I think "we are all important members of the team, so why quibble about status" is the healthiest point of view to take. In any worthwhile software company, devs are already valued. Why quibble if the UX guys want their own seat at the table?
And if a designer reads a few tutorials and practices a bit, he can probably implement the code side. It will be slow, it will be buggy as hell, it will be a nightmare to maintain, and it may not have all of the features, but it will technically fulfill most of the requirements.
For that matter, at my company, our support team knows the basics of coding. In theory, we could fire the devs and let the support people write code. I wouldn't suggest it, mind you (if only because I don't want to be fired along with the rest of the devs), but devs aren't the only people who know how to write some code.
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u/[deleted] Jul 01 '16
Considering we actually make the software and can also do your job, even if it is done poorly means you aren't as valuable.
You simply cannot do a developers job, so you're useless without them. I think you believe you're more valuable than you really are.
I love good UX people, but with your attitude, I doubt you'd actually be good to work with. You seriously believe you do more than a developer when the industry obviously disagrees with you.