I partially agree with you, but additionally there's a whole set of employees who would be clearly redundant in any given company if that company decided to just use a simple, idiomatic, off the shelf UI system. Or even to implement one but without attempting to reinvent well understood patterns.
One reason so many single-person products are so nice is because that single developer didn't have the time and resources to try to re-think how buttons or drop downs or tabs should work. Instead, they just followed existing patterns.
Meanwhile when you have 3 designers and 5 engineers, with the natural ratio of figma sketch-to-production ready implementation being at least an order of magnitude, the only way to justify the design headcount is to make shit complicated.
But every company I worked at in the past 10 years or so eventually coalesced around a singular "design system" managed by one person or a small core team. But that just goes back to my original point - every company had their own design system, and there is not a single, industry-wide set of "rails".
The bigger issue I see with "got to keep lots of designers employed" problem is the series of pointless, trend-following redesigns you'd see all the time. That said, I've seen many design departments get absolutely slaughtered at a lot of web/SaaS companies in the past 3 years. A lot of the issue designers were working on in the web and mobile for the 25 years prior are now essentially "solved problems", and so, except for the integration of AI (where I've seen nearly every company just add a chat box and that AI star icon), it looks like there is a lot less to do.
> But every company I worked at in the past 10 years or so eventually coalesced around a singular "design system" managed by one person or a small core team.
As a designer, the issue I see is that desktop design requires knowledge and experience of the native toolkits.
This makes desktop the hardest platform to design (well) for.
For example, on macOS you need to know about where the customisation points are in NSMenu, you need to know a little about the responder chain etc.
Most designers only have web or mobile experience, and the nuances of the desktop get lost, even at th design stage. You end up with a custom and shallow system that is weird in the context of the OS.
You also end up with stuff like no context menus, weird hover states (hand cursors anyone?), weird font and UI sizing (why are Spotify's UI elements literally twice the size of native controls? The saving grace of it being an Electron app is that I can zoom out 3 steps to make the UI size sane). I digress...
I've heard exactly the same response before and I shared your reaction.
The other thing that makes "dogfood" make sense is that sometimes you aren't the direct target audience of the product. So: would you feed this to your own dog?
The average person generally seems less than neutral to see me.
Many people aren’t just openly hostile, they make a point to immediately let you know they aren’t here to help, they’re here to make everyone’s life less pleasant.
With people, there are many scenarios where if you’re out of line, disagree, that’s it. You’re done. They’ll never ever consider you worth any reasonable sort of treatment.
Do you consider the implementation of such specs by another human to (always) be correct and deterministic?
Heck, if I reimplement something I worked on a month ago it’s probably not going to be the exact same. Being non deterministic needn’t to be a problem, as long as it falls within certain boundaries and produces working results.
> I feel like you can't really be considered a staff/principal if you can't already tell ahead of time where the perf bottleneck will be just on experience and intuition.
I have a Honda Hybrid CR-V and love the drivetrain. We're waiting until Honda moves that drivetrain into the Odyssey (which is the van we want... probably what you have, hah)
I live in an old, pre-automobile neighborhood. Like other such old, walkable, sidewalk-and-park-and-corner-store neighborhoods in the US, it's one of the most attractive parts of my city.
However, almost nobody here could feasibly own a fully electric car. Most houses don't have driveways or garages. People park ad-hoc on the street. Most families own one car, and that car needs to be able to go long distances because it's both the local vehicle and the road tripper.
My wife and I would buy an EV if we could. We know the exact one. But it's not feasible for us, or for our neighbors. Far from being "1%" this situation is quite common. So we have a Honda hybrid instead.
Probably an exaggeration? But I hope that tapping for pause isn't critical for anyone's daily life.
I use wireless headphones and in fact never use this feature (I have it disabled). Too unreliable when there's a large screen with a big pause and skip button within reach.
One reason so many single-person products are so nice is because that single developer didn't have the time and resources to try to re-think how buttons or drop downs or tabs should work. Instead, they just followed existing patterns.
Meanwhile when you have 3 designers and 5 engineers, with the natural ratio of figma sketch-to-production ready implementation being at least an order of magnitude, the only way to justify the design headcount is to make shit complicated.
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