I agree with a big part of your statement, except that it still seems to assume that good leadership is about success in the end. I think we often forget that leadership can be about creating a good environment for people to enjoy working in. That is something you can have influence on to a certain degree. Success, for so many reasons, is mostly out of our control. So yes, leadership is important, but not for the reason you might think it is. We just seem to keep telling ourselves this because business success is the only metric we keep using, and I think that’s wrong. Being mildly successful or unsuccessful is far more likely to happen, but you can do it in a way that still inspires people to come to work every day. That, to me, is the real goal of leadership.

Well, you are right, there’s always room for improvement. One way you can try to address this is by letting people of design, development and other backgrounds work together on open source projects. Every summer for the past four years I’ve been a (design) coach for the students who build open source stuff at https://2018.summerofcode.be. Hopefully, in a couple of years, a few of these people will become major open source contributors and they will remember how important design was, even in open source projects :-).

If you’re interested in potentially changing things with a bit of a longer-term timeline, you could maybe get in touch with the organisation and try and set up your own version of open summer of code?

As a rule, design doesn’t work in a consensus-building engineering driven environment. I think this is quoting or paraphrasing John Gruber: “The quality of any collaborative creative endeavour tends to approach the level of taste of whoever has the final cut.” I agree with that statement.

I also tend to agree with Sacha, I’m not sure it is a real problem. Some stuff is not designed the way we would like to, and that’s okay. Our designer glasses are not the only right way to look at the world ;-).

This is definitely different from the experience that I have, but maybe there are studies that disprove this. I’ve seen plenty of unskilled people labelled Senior and skilled people labelled Junior. If you regard the label a label of “how much experience someone has” then think about this: if you have 10 years of experience being a lazy, unskilled designer, are you a Senior? And would you be happy with that title?

There are most likely regional differences as well. In any case, I think you could ask yourself what you want to achieve and then act accordingly. If the goal is to get the senior designer label, you could move to a company with 0 designers, tell them you have 3 years of experience and call yourself a senior designer. If the goal is to become a better designer, then continue doing what you describe here and hopefully in 20 years or so you’ll be able to look back on an amazing journey.

If you rephrase the question to “how do I become a better designer,” and reflect on that, you will find your answer.

You know someone dropped the ball when they forgot to hang the punctuation.

I love News Explorer because it has iCloud sync and it’s not dependent on some external server. Also love how they sometimes push really good updates. And the native feel and availability on all Apple platforms is pretty good.

Can someone block this guy from posting articles? It's spam 101.