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Carving your space

heather-buchel.com

51 pointsleotravis1020 comments

I'd like to engage in the discussion the article raises about why teams don't hire for this role.

So, I have actually tried to hire for this role. Multiple times.

The reality is that I got an order of magnitude fewer applications of an order of magnitude lower quality when I've tried to describe this role, as compared to when I just put the standardized "front end engineer" title in the role.

So instead I tried to just sift through the "front end engineer" applicants to find people with design sensibilities. But this also yielded poor results. After reviewing at least a thousand applicants, I found one or two people with this combination of skillsets, and one of them to whom I made an offer ended up going with a different firm.

Senior engineers in our team said things like "I think you're searching for a unicorn that doesn't exist" and "people just don't mix the right-brained and left-brained skills."

After trying so hard, I just accepted that and decided to work with dedicated designers and dedicated engineers. Each are good at what they do.

But our web experience is definitely lacking for lack of someone in this role. Right now, this week, I'm trying to fill the gap as I can do a little bit of both. Everyone on our team feels like we need some "glue" to tie our experiences together well. But a designer can't make it happen and a pure engineer can't imagine what to do without very explicit detailed designs / instructions. It's so much more effective for one person to at once understand how the code needs to function, what helps the user, and have design sensibility to make the form 'function' w/r/t cognitive overload and intuition. Things get lost in communication without someone who can understand all three. But there's no one I feel I can truly delegate this to completely on our product team.

What have the experiences been of other people who have hired and built product teams?

While I've never done it, it might be worth headhunting and paying more than the engineering market rate if you have specific requirements like this. Two of my friends have this exact skillset, but they're both moving into management because it pays better, so you'd have to convince them that you're able to offer A) a salary competitive with a tech lead or EM, and B) sufficiently interesting work.

I think if you're expecting to find someone with 5 years experience who'll work for a mid-level engineering salary but also understand design, you might need to adjust your expectations towards paying more or hiring older people from non-traditional backgrounds, maybe both.

I asked professional recruiters about hiring for this role and they told me the same thing as our engineers: that I'm searching for a unicorn that barely exists, and they didn't feel confident in being able to deliver a candidate for this. And this was talking to boutique technical recruiters for startups, not big generic firms.

I can't really speak to the hiring side, but... I'm a devops engineer who went to art school. I rarely get to exercise my design skills at my day job, sadly.

We exist. There just aren't many of us.

Not sure how old you are, but among my friends of 40-50 year olds there's more of us than not, lots of philosophers, musicians, writers, designers, who got drawn to the appeal of the web as a communication platform for interesting media that then ended up getting... I don't want to say stuck but that might be the right word... in jobs that pay well.

I'm 42, so that checks out. And yeah, my career started because I had just graduated university (finally) with a history degree, and I decided to turn my coding hobby into a job instead of going to grad school.

Then it just snowballed from there.

Yeah but if you hire old people you can't boss them around...

A few times in my career I've been looking for exactly this role, a place that would value sense and design/ux sensibility as well as an understanding of what is technically possible. Larger companies don't hire for this role, because it does not have a name. You could write “Temple Grandin for the web”, but that is closer to magic, something non-scalable, a position that is created for a specific person. I ended up working in small teams, often in experimental research positions, but that too is very special and esoteric.

If the role had a name, not even a theoretical foundation but simply a name, then and only then it could actually exist.

If you can't hire for it but you have solid raw materials, slowly bringing the front-end dev closer to the customer can bridge some of that gap.

It's not going to get you to some bauhaus ideal overnight, but it might start to click for them in a way that leaves you better off than you are today.

What would you look for when assessing design sensibilities that would make someone stand out?

how they describe what they want to work on and their experience, looking at their personal projects to see if any attention was paid to design, what they do with our take home exercise... it's really not actually hard to sift. most engineers just straight up say they don't have design sensibilities. and you can pretty quickly tell if someone who claims to have design sensibilities has chops for it by just glancing at some of their prior work.

what i found is that there are some people who say they are interested in design but are pretty bad at our technical interview, like totally in a lower rung than the engineering candidates, and very very rarely do you find someone that is a 7/10 or above in both design sensibility and engineering chops, even rarer to find an 8 or a 9. (arbitrary scoring scale for conveying my point -- i don't have a specific rubric for this)

Hey I would love to reach out!

Hi, I’m this unicorn, and I’m actively seeking a new role.

Hey, I’m a new grad and have exactly that skill set. I couldn’t find a way to contact you in your bio, but I’d love to chat if you’re hiring!

How can I reach out to you? I believe I'm exactly who you're looking for, and I'm available :)

This role is usually called UX Engineering or Design Developer in the industry. Have you tried using it?

Interesting. I expected frontend devs to be able to handle the front-of and back-of equally well, but it sounds like that's very rarely the case. Are people that fall into this camp more likely to be at design-led companies, like Apple?

Also, does anyone have resource recommendations for a frontend engineer to get better at these things? I've built up some solid intuition after working closely with a designer, but my big hurdle has been feeling like I need to dive deep into design world, get good at Figma, etc. Reading about the theory/concepts makes sense, but putting it into practice is what I feel will make it really stick.

Perhaps the Beautiful Software effort of the Building Beauty program? https://www.buildingbeauty.org/

I've had similar experiences trying to sit somewhere between Architecture and Platform Engineering (enabling a culture of autonomous product team delivery within an environment of enforced design constraints). It takes a lot of work to build towards a role where designing something like this could be possible; I've never seen a company hire for this kind of thing explicitly. Plus, if they've already built it, it evolves without the need of a specialist.

You just need to be in the right place at the right time, I guess.

As someone struggling to quite literally fit into a similar role (have both words in official job title), I also feel most large company culture's are naturally poised to be at conflict with these roles!

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