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I have to agree. I had UX as its own specific job role for a little while and it was absolutely miserable. Not satisfying in the least. It might have been different at another organization but overall, you're just an appendage that's not doing a lot to impact the final product.

Much more gratifying for me, as someone with both taste and technical background, is my current role where I just do everything. Prototype, build, design and ship apps and the whole loop closes inside my own head. But I have very specific experience for this – I don't know how often this is really practical.

Either way, I'd probably hate having a "UX guy" hovering around putting his dick into everything I'm working on. I suspect the only time "UX guy" can really, truly work as its own role is when you're CEO or some other autonomous leadership figure.

"It’s our job to help translate their vision to the development team in a way that they can understand and accept" "Similarly, we need to speak on behalf the developers to help reign in the designers, at times."

"I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?" :)

UX ripped off skills from different majors and combined them together to form a new job: usability from designers, planning and organizing and wireframing from project managers, testing from QA and test groups, and prototyping from developers.

this leaves managers with traffic between sales/clients, designers, UX bullshitters and developers. It leaves designers with making the wireframes look better. It leaves developers with production work.

UX developer: "we should do this and this and this." Developer: "yes master"

To me UX is a set of skills that designers and developers should learn and earn. That what makes a Designer and a Developer: SENIOR. What is seniority then? Speed? CEO: "Yes this is our senior designer. He can design a website in 5 minutes. He's senior because he knows all Photoshop shortcuts and is fast with the tools. By the way, his designs look nice and he follows everything the UX Designer tells him to."

I believe we'd be selling ourselves short if we didn't already take those three big quotes into consideration when developing applications. If you're in a startup environment and not writing one-off client applications, you're probably already well versed in this so-called "UDX" voodoo magic. The designer/developer relationship is one of give and take. Compromises must be made for the sake of completing tasks on time.

My advise is to simply wear many hats; especially to keep clowns like these "UXD" types out of your company.

I always thought a UX designer was the one who worried about how the interface functioned.

Like in iOS, for example, when it does that little bounce thing when you reach the end of a scroll view. That is something a UX designer would design. As opposed to a visual designer who would make it look pretty.

As a designer and developer, I boggles my mind that not all programmers can do design work. Likewise, it seems strange that visual designers can't also do interaction design. However, in the real world most people in this space seem to be more specialized. A visual designer cannot necessarily make a good functioning interface, hence the need for someone else to fill that gap.

I don't know what the middle-man between designers and developers is all about. We can communicate just fine and wouldn't be the job of a user experience person, by my definition, anyway.

Your example isn't so much UX Designer vs. Visual Designer, but instead an example of a good designer.

As Steve Jobs said, "Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."

Your visual designer that can't make an interface is someone I might describe as a [graphic] artist.

Semantics, I know, but a differentiation that I (thankfully) helps to reduce the use of "UX" in job titles -- a trend I've come to dislike.

I agree, and that is sort of what I was trying to get at. A really good developer should be able to create a wonderful user experience all the way down to writing stable and performing code.

However, not all developers are really good. Sometimes you have to bring in someone to work on the design, allowing the programmer to focus on stable and performing code. That is why we have come to have designers and developers.

Similarly, not all designers are really good. Sometimes you have to bring in someone who can focus on the experience while letting the other designer focus on the style. And that is why we're starting to see multiple people take on the different design roles.

Becoming really good at your craft is hard. Some people haven't spent the time required to become really good, or don't have the interest, or in very rare cases are incapable.

Because really good people are hard to find, businesses are forced to break up the jobs up to allow multiple people to fill their niche. I don't know if it is the right thing, but I'm not sure what else can be done. We can't all hire Apple's top talent, even if money was no object.

I think one solution is to stop searching for people with magical titles who claim to do everything with a wave of their UX wand, and instead assemble teams of awesome people who can work well with other awesome people.

A kickass designer + kickass developer [+ kickass writer] will create a better user experience than a self-proclaimed "UX designer/developer/guru" any day.

I believe hiring the best is the desire of all employers, but software people, of abilities big and small, are in short supply in today's marketplace.

I mean, if you are really going to set out to hire only the best, why even look at people who are just a designer or developer? Why not hire the person who is kickass at designing, developing, and writing?

Someone who has intimate knowledge of all areas of software development is going to build a better product than three people who are only skilled in their limited subsets.

I'm inclined to believe the same thing.

I'm not so much irked by "UX Designers", as they have a seemingly useful role if you consider what they claim. Many of their practices however are laughable at best and rarely accomplish their stated goals.

Why should I trust your soft approach to UX? If I'm paying you 70,000 a year, that means you should be providing more than 70,000 a year worth of value - Otherwise theres not really much point in hiring you. Can any UX designer, even in principle, provide more than modest value for sites whose users don't number into the 10s of millions? Keep in mind that its not the difference between no design and a good design when you hire a UX designer, Its the difference between a design generated by someone who isn't a UX professional (but probably is willing to read up on the elements of successful design) and a UX professional who.... possesses no real qualifications or mechanism to distinguish him from the non-UX professional save his assertion that he "has an eye for design". You could hire a High school graduate with an interest in technology, offer to pay him 25k/yr to sit in a comfy chair and write out jquery + html and be absolutely stoked about it, how much more of a value proposition do you get out of a "UX designer"?

I want to clarify this isn't a dig against people who truly provide value and make a difference for users - Theres some UX & UI people out there who are changing the face of their businesses by the work of their own hands and their untamable passion for the human enterprise. But those people would have likely kicked ass anyway.

So I suppose lastly, I'd be distrustful as a rule of most people who claim to generate value through soft, rather than hard means. Historically you would not be unwise to bet on the success of Mathematics and the failure of subjective analysis in virtually every field ranging from analyzing human emotions to machine translation, even fields traditionally decried for being approached mathematically (Because surely a human can only understand what makes up being human?) have been absolutely revolutionized by using an approach that has been working for the past 10k years of human history - Application of cold logic and lots and lots of hard work.

So whats someone who isn't a "science person" to do in an era that increasingly marginalizes those who cannot do hard mental labor? Well you do the only thing you can do with nothing but time on your hands - You market yourself.

[P.S - If you want UX/UI people who aren't full of their own shit, a truly excellent ex-coworker of mine - Sam Asante @ http://samasante.com/ is currently looking for a job in San Francisco]

So I suppose lastly, I'd be distrustful as a rule of most people who claim to generate value through soft, rather than hard means.

I'm sympathetic to you, because I'm the "hard" science guy. When I studied CS, it was about hard science, because there generally weren't consumer facing jobs to be had.

But now most of the successful apps, and the ones talked about on HN aren't technically difficult. The reason things like the Thiel fund even are on the radar is because most apps, whether mobile or web, could be coded up by a modestly bright 13 year-old. Seriously. The part that separates great from forgotten is the UX and design.

There was once a popular saying that went something like, "Well he's no rocket scientist". I think its fair to say that we'll likely not hear people say, "Well he's no computer programmer". In fact if anything quite the opposite -- "Anyone can learn it... it's like programming".

http://hntrends.jerodsanto.net/?q=ux+developer

Developer - How application will work?

Designer - How application will look?

UX - How application will feel?

"Look & Feel" is part of the designer role; UX is more like "How much the user understands the app" i think.

how much the app understands the user