I used to dabble in coding. A little javascript, some perl and even a tiny bit of C++. Nothing serious though, not with those languages at least. I did, however, spend a large portion of the last decade programming in Flash’s native language – AcionScript. Because I’ve always been an avid Flashie I took up AS when it was first introduced. Because of that I was, for a short time, Silicon Valley’s expert on the field, and because of that it netted me a lot of jobs. Hell, just last week I had to turn down an ActionScripting job that came to me out of the Valley.
Now, I should say, that I’ve let my scripting skills deteriorate quite a bit. The fact that Adobe has moved from AS2.0 to AS3.0 hasn’t helped much either – I haven’t really tried to learn the new language at all. But more importantly, and this is something I realized many years ago, I am a designer – not a programmer.
Being a thirty-something in Silicon Valley meant I had a lot of thirty-something friends. And in that area, when you are in your late 20s and on, chances are your employment had something to do with the tech business and more often than not it seemed that you were probably a software engineer. Actually, this is still true today.
Anyway, my point is I know a lot of engineers. Friends, parents of friends, friends of friends, neighbors, neighbors of friends, etc. You just can’t get away from them. That’s not a bad thing either. My best friends from California are engineers in one way or another. I am here to say it out loud and proud, engineers make damn good friends!
However, so too am I here to gripe about one thing. Something I’ve always had to deal with. Something most engineers do. Something everyone who’s not an engineer should be fed up about – Engineer’s and their weirdly fucked, and retardedly anal workflows.
You see, while they may seem like social creatures subject to the same urges, wants and needs as you and I, engineers are actually solitary critters. No, seriously, most are. Once they check in through that front office door it’s over – Maths and Order become the rule while social understanding and basic interfacing become the exception. Believe me! I’ve seen it. I’ve had to work with these people!
Now, you can’t totally blame them for who they’ve become. The very jobs they are tasked to do often demand this behavior. Your average engineer in any tech company today is doing the work of 5 engineers – at the least. They work long hours and when they do get home all they have to look forward to is their loved one berating them on how they aren’t social enough, soulless, cold and on and on. That is unless they are smart enough to couple within their own breed – in which case they and their loved one can be blissfully boring together in the after hours.
But seriously, because of the demands of their work they are often forced to create personal work flows that allow them to work more efficiently. These work flows, while they do genuinely allow your average programmer to do 20 tasks at the click of a button, make it impossible for everyone else in the outside world to interface with the engineer and their products unless you adhere to their rigid and mind numbingly fuck-stupid methods of programatic order. In their efforts to make their lives easier, they’ve made it impossible for everyone else.
So here I come into the equation, Mr. Designer. My job is often to look at the big picture and help guide a user from A to B without having to actually tell the user how to do it. You know, make things instinctual – easy! Well, the moment I start doing this it’s never long before the engineer starts in, “Well, that’s not technically possible with the way things are set up right now.”
Well, yes, I know. That’s why I am here in the first place. The way you’ve set things up have made it impossible for anyone to get anywhere. Your approach of personal streamlining has crippled the entire journey. Thanks to your work flows, most people log into your site with a hope and a smile and leave with a aneurysm and a drool bib.
Secondly, and this is something I like to point out in person, is that of course you can do what I am asking. That’s the beauty of programming! You can do shit! Cool shit! Shit no one’s done! Even shit that makes other shit easier!
This is usually when the engineer sighs and says, “I guess we can change things around to accommodate a new design.” Which is all I ask, really. I’m not getting paid to make your life harder, I am getting paid to make your product better and I would guess that’s why, ultimately, you are getting paid too.
Now surely there’s a post out there, written by a programmer about how lame it is to work with designers. The good news is no one will ever read it cause it’s probably written in binary (cause engineers think shit like that is witty).
To be fair, most of my friends never really suffered from this condition. Then again many of them never really seemed like engineers to start off with – more like crazy scientists with lofty and noble ambitions. Sadly, though, this is a real problem and the next time you try to do something simple like toast some bread and you have to turn more than 1 dial, or when you have to turn off your operating system by pressing the start button you’ll know who to blame.