eventually, at the top of the stack, there's some one who asked the question: "how are people going to interact with this?"
my hash table is useless if the users can't tickle the UI in such a way as to use the hash table.
my hash table is useless if the users can't tickle the UI in such a way as to use the hash table.
That's not to say design is unimportant, just that plenty of teams are better off adding there 30th coder before their first designer. Others may be better off adding there 10th designer before there 2nd coder, but I have never heard of them.
I do not doubt that certain skills have more value than others in certain contexts but it's difficult to work on a team where the importance is emphasized.