1027: The Rise of the Design Engineer

**Wes Bos** (0:00)
Welcome to Syntax today. We got a potluck episode. We're talking to you about the come up of the design engineers. This is a new thing you're hearing a lot about. And I, quite honestly, I think this is going to be a very important role in companies going forward. Talking about how to introduce your kids to AI, or if you even should, we've got special guests coming on, so stay tuned for that.
Update on Scott using Omarji in Linux. Is he still doing it, or is he switched back to Mac OS? Why AI has no taste?
We'll talk a little bit more about design in this episode, and it's not just about how it looks. Design is not just like, oh, I chose red, because a lot of these apps look exactly the same, but they're not the same in how they function. And finally, we're talking about keeping coding agents efficient. How should you tackle building your projects so that they are efficient and not just spewing out a whole bunch of extra files? I got some really good tips from Scott on that one. If you've got a question you'd like us to answer, please go to Syntax.fm, click on Potluck in the navigation, and send us that. We will answer it on a future episode. What's up, Scott? You ready to get going?

**Scott Tolinski** (1:09)
Hell, yeah. I'm ready to get going.

**Wes Bos** (1:11)
All right.
First question from Birthday Girl says, I'm a designer and self-taught developer with a background in design. I see myself as a hybrid, equally good at both, and don't want to define myself primarily as one or the other.
Recently, the role of design engineer has been on The Rise, and they linked to a Vercel blog post that essentially says what a design engineer is. A design engineer at Vercel blend aesthetic sensibility with technical skill. This allows us to deeply understand a problem, the design, and build and ship a solution autonomously, right? Somebody who has the eye for design and the UX of design, as well as actually being able to build the entire thing. So this term of design engineer is on The Rise, which I think captures the dual expertise well. I have two questions. First, what are your thoughts on the future of design dev separations or convergence? And two, I feel like most engineers discount design and dev hybrid expertise if they come from a design background, but the vice versa is not true. A really talented engineer who got really good at designs seems to have credibility issues.
Are people biased at design because it is not as a technical background? I find this a bit silly, given the developer community is very welcoming of self-taught developers. Or do I experience this more because I am a woman? Curious to hear your thoughts on this. Super design savvy devs. Thanks for the part. Okay, this is awesome. And I love this idea of a design engineer because many years ago, we had this question of should designers code? And everybody would fight about it. They say, no, no, no. I'm going to sit in Photoshop and I'm going to design my things. And then I'm going to hand it off to somebody else to actually do the implementation of it. And then equally, you've heard devs being super frustrated where I design this thing. And then I handed it off and they didn't do a very good job. And then as the web got more complex, design became much more about how does it work? How do you interact with it? How do these things work together rather than simply just like, what does it look like? Right? Like I think that's such a very small part of design. So I love this idea of a design engineer, which is somebody who very well understands how products work, how user interfaces work, how they, what happens when you click it, what happens when you have multiple items together. This stuff is so, we have a question coming up next that is similar to this. I won't say too much, but this stuff is so important, especially as everybody is just vibe coding their UIs right now and there's pooping out some dog crap, right? So I think that this design engineer is fantastic. And I think it's going to be even more important in the next coming, maybe probably six months, you know? Everybody and their mother can prompt out a half-decent looking UI.
But where excellent UIs really come to the surface is where somebody who spends time understanding how it all works together and how it interacts and what happens when you hover over top of it and the little frustrations that come with using an application. I've got more to say that in the next question, but I think that this skill is going to be the new full stack developer. Because that was the other thing. I'll let you talk in a second, Scott, but that was the huge thing that everybody fought over as well as like, should you be a full stack engineer or should you be back end and front end? That's no longer a question. In most cases, people are doing both in the web world.