What did/do you think of this NY Times article from a few years ago.

I think it's because people are cultured/socialized to talk differently about art and about websites. Still, there are tons of people who talk about which things they like better or prefer, or "my kid could paint that", etc. And I bet if I asked my painter/illustrator friends, they'd have a few horror stories to share, too.

Also, it's interesting that you keep using the word "authority." Authority is not something objective; it's a quality of the power relationship between 2+ parties.

When you say "there's always someone who thinks he knows better than the designer," I'd say it's less that the designer doesn't have authority, but that there's something in the relationship preventing the other person from recognizing the designer's authority.

Anyway, from my point of view (shaped by my own experience, usually in-house), our authority isn't final say/veto power, but more consultative or challenging.

In addition to technical knowledge: Experience, learning, skill/talent, continued professional development in the field, mindset

Anyone can do it. Not everyone should (like a lot of professions).

And it's easy to have opinions about design since it's more visible/apparent than other things (Client: "No, Mrs. Engineer, this architecture should be MVVC, not MVP. And I want you to use functional programming.")

We try to have consistent, clear, predictable naming for things so developers will know which element we're talking about.

It works well with Zeplin/InVision Inspect (when we name our layers and groups correctly; we use atomic design/modular design/pseudo-BEM).

Also, the QA team is surprisingly talented at quick image editing and sometimes slices things up even further without us knowing haha

Following what Philip said, this post from Slack's engineering team has a great visualization of specificity, and a description of why the team refactored the way it did.

"I maybe wrongly assumed every generation likes UIs that look nice and are easy to use."

Those mean different things to different people. Like the buttons on your website: they look nice, but they barely pass a squint test (and the hover effect is practically unreadable); same with the "email me" links on the grey background like on your Visuals page.

Is this an example of "millennial" design? Not as much as someone using Instagram-y gradient maps or super saturated duotone images like Spotify. I'd just call this ineffective because of poor contrast on important CTAs.

Without knowing much more, it's possibly your boss's indirect way of saying he or she thinks your work won't work for your audience/users (perhaps because it would look unfamiliar compared to the other websites they use). Still, the way they said it wasn't constructive. What are some themes that have come up in critiques/reviews? And what did you say/ask when your boss called it "millennial"?

P.S., there are plenty of changes to vision that come with age. If you start working within a heavily regulated industry, it'll be helpful to brush up on them.

Paper, Evernote, and Trello (hooked up to Pocket and other things with IFTTT or Zapier, can't remember)

Talk to somebody you can trust (like a therapist) about it. Maybe you're within the normal range, but either way, it's good to get a professional perspective, and the act of talking with someone can be cathartic and can help you maintain balance.

Meditation helps me; YMMV. This meditation is always great.

Tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen, pour myself a cup of ambition, and yawn and stretch and try to come to life.

7-ish: wake up 7:35-7:45: first-third alarms go off. Get dressed etc. 8:20ish: walk 15-ish minutes to transit to take me to work 9:05-ish: arrive at work, make coffee, fill a 1.5L bottle of water, and hole myself up in a room somewhere to check Designer News and work till Scrum at 10:30.