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Comment by chasing | Hacker News Reader

Because not talking to users and then implementing a drastic change they don’t like sounds like a rookie move? Although, as I kind of allude to, I also place a lot of blame on management: Employees will make mistakes. Big ones. That’s life. A company needs to be structured so there are checks before those mistakes go out into the wild.

But, yes: Senior designers can also make mistakes. I’d argue they make less glaringly obvious mistakes, but humans will human.

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while i get what you’re saying i also know many senior devs who swim in dogma of their own creation, finding some trend they personally aspire to and enforcing it religiously. i think the relative experience of a dev is not a clue for me on if they are going to do research on what the end users actually need.

I was talking about designers, specifically. But I have found that senior people on any I’ll are generally more capable of making considered choices. Not all, of course. And engineers definitely will bias towards tools they understand and have had good past experiences with. Again, to be “senior” at something means being aware of these biases and making reasoned choices despite them.

I see in your comments some bias too. You assume that UX designer made wrong choices, hence this person was junior. In fact, many designers have specialization and the choices made were good from a perspective of a printed media designer (management error - wrong hire/assignment). Or the designer was not aware of specific use cases, that were not communicated by the product manager. It is very easy and straightforward to blame the designer, but the root causes are very often somewhere else. Too often it’s just failure to understand specialization and hiring wrong people for the job.

> Because not talking to users and then implementing a drastic change they don’t like sounds like a rookie move?

That sounds like every single sad tale where a change of management/executives forces some new process or tool on their underlings without any input. (Perhaps those are junior developer CTOs?)

So the thesis of the OP was straightforward and clear because of all the facts in the history. Replacing that with some generic tale about mismanagement and the accursed junior-run-amok is comparatively less interesting.

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