In my experience, the closer you are to the implementation—and by this I mean the more involved you …

> These days, many “UX designers”, “UI designers”, and “product designers” have never written a line of code. Same for some "architects". They just draw up random system designs that don't work for THEIR environment. > This is precisely why it’s a tragedy that the roles in software development have become so compartmentalized. The worse part of it all is it's not the software engineer's fault either (most of the time). HR, managers and others haven't improved over time and instead are enforcing non-software values on the engineers. It's all about ticking boxes. You get classified as a Go REST API backend engineer and somehow you can't touch React because that's not your thing.

This is a really great comment. To me, "UX" still feels like a relatively new term. In its modern incarnation it's not what I do, although by intent it's actually my career speciality. As a category now, it feels like a poor compromise between true design and true code/userflow. I believe the existing tools try to bridge a gap that has existed since the earliest days of web development between the designers and the code monkeys. I'm fortunate as a solo coder to have a very tight feedback loop with my own graphic design, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I started writing code making text-based games as a kid in the 80s, then became obsessed with graphic design, went to art school, worked as a designer at a traditional ad agency which had no coders... and because of my code competency became the go-to person for making web. And later apps. So I still currently art direct designers and…

This isn't just a software thing... all of corporate america has compartmentalized and while the results in churning out widgets are actually very good, the results in practically everything else are bad bad bad. Even in finance, Warren Buffett will preach that investing is not a team sport - you need all the details in one head.

I think the reason UX moved into its own realm (like "UX designer") is to create the processes to get actual UX expertise. Without deliberate UX expertise, you're on the hook for having UI implementers (software engineers) who happen to be good at UX, and that's not a great way to go about ensuring that you have good UX because you're reliant on serendipity. And of course once UX becomes its own prong that you're trying to optimize for, the simplest thing to do is create UX positions in your company. Which is much simpler than figuring out how to hire software engineers with UX expertise or good intuitions. Just consider how few hiring processes involve someone clicking into your github projects and evaluating them just to see what kind of code you write. That's much harder than doing a canned leetcode or canned questions interview.