The more important question: do the people paying you care if it’s good design? Because the people who have paid me thus far in my career have not cared.
I think there's a pretty universal consensus that a good design matters.
If you’re lucky your client hired you because they, too, care and believe design to be important, but that’s far from a given.
And many designers are artists ("designers") not ux engineers, so their main goal is to make something that shows their artistic skill - they're going to be trained in design packages, not designing a good ui.
(I mean, when was the last time you saw a clickable button on a modern user interface? nowadays it's just "guess what this shade of grey means")
Isn’t the obvious fix there to let the designer design and the implementer implement? Obviously if the designer is kept out of the loop completely they may not even be in a position to argue for the importance of good design (or just any design process), but then it shouldn’t be surprising that the outcome is bad design.
In any case, as I said, you get a problem if the person who designs the app is simply someone who was trained in coding, and you get a problem if they're simply someone who was trained in art.
> Unfortunately, you never really find out until you work somewhere.
If you invest in a stock that you tried to research and it drops to a value of zero and you say "well you never really know until you try it", am I gaslighting you if I tell you that there's room for improvement in your due diligence process?
A CTO hiring you and then leaving the company 2 weeks after you started is a major red flag. This is not a common occurrence in anything but a dysfunctional org. Now, there is of course only so far you can predict into the future, and surprises do happen. But whose decision was it to accept the offer? And who is ultimately on the hook for it, whether it's in your control or not? To protect yourself, you need to own the responsibility for that decision, even if you have no control over it happening inside the company.
There are companies you can accept offers from where the chances of this happening are one in several thousand, and companies where the chances are closer to one in fifty. To what extent are you confident in your ability to accurately predict and gauge a range and confidence interval about that?
I used to say the same things you did, and I kept getting the same results. Eventually, I just got tired of it and I realized I'd do quite a lot to prevent it from happening in the future -- or at least, if it happened again, I didn't want it to be a surprise. I'm thankful to say that I'm significantly closer to that point now, although it took many years of trial and error. And surely, I have even more room to improve, and I look forward to honing my technique even further as I gain more experience!
If what you're trying isn't working for you, it may be worthwhile to try to reconsider your process and see if you can improve it. If you don't even try to improve it and you're unhappy with your results, why do you think that would ever change?
> This is not a common occurrence in anything but a dysfunctional org.
This happens all the time in orgs all over the planet. Hiring managers and executives get new jobs and things change. Time from offer acceptance to starting work is always nonzero in big companies (measured in weeks to months in most of the fortune 500, I'd bet - my current company is Fortune 10[1], so there's that - cto in this case means of the particular division of this company, not the parent).
Now, please... do us both a favor and stop talking out of your ass.