I think both skills can be learned. I also think that people have intrinsic talents that make them better or worse at those skills.
Put another way, anyone can learn to code but some people will never be great at it while others have a natural talent. Same for design.
I’m curious why you think otherwise. What’s the difference in your mind?
Like the moment something doesn’t happen like the tutorial said (error message saying “idk what python is, you mean python3?”), they just give up completely instead of googling it. I really feel like the venn diagram of “people who can code” and “people who can google errors they don’t understand for a couple hours” is nearly a perfect circle.
LLMs can smooth out those little tediums, so maybe more people really will be able to learn programming now. But then again if you don’t have the patience to trudge through the annoying parts, will you have the patience to be confused and struggle, instead of letting Claude do the hard stuff for you? I’ll be interested to see what future self-taught devs look like!
Same can be said for any skill.
Threads like this bother me a bit because it makes programmers seem so smug, like they are this gifted class that is able to wizard the machine where mere mortals cannot.
Its intellectual elitism.
But the "elitism" is becoming something that is less and less relevant because people are less needing to learn it anymore thanks AI.
I was trying to say the opposite!! Googling errors for hours is NOT in intellectually demanding task. It’s tedious.
It might work but the moment something fails, llm suggest hacks instead of solution.
Maybe that love, or at least liking something, comes from inherent talent to some degree but all the talent in the world won’t help you if you don’t put in the time.
Design on the other hand especially modern design is easy. It's just text placement, geometric shapes and proper colors that synergize. This isn't like anatomical drawings or oil paintings. It's not just easy, it's obviously easy. What needs to be learned is how to use the tools and do it with speed which does take time and training, but again this is not rocket science, a lot of what looks "good" and "modern" is intuitive and obvious. And modern design is just easy to draw.
I mean look at hacker news. It's pretty clean. I like the aesthetic. I bet a "designer" didn't even touch it.
What you’ve described is “visual design” which is a subset of the design field.
There are many sub-specialties, but at its core design is about problem-solving, communication, and empathy.
There are a lot of bad designers who are great at making things pretty.
A good designer spends more time researching, understanding the problem space, interviewing users, brainstorming, etc., than pushing pixels around.
Most designers see themself above others because they are somehow good in putting different elements together and say: This is great.
And for whatever reason, even the most worst youngster designers consider themself to be gurus, like everybody who learnt coding yesterday wouldnt say "Im John Carmack".
Designers are a special type of people
Also I agree with a lot of what you said. The only difference is I feel anyone can do it. The qualities you attributed to a good designer are trivial to learn. Make no mistake it takes time and effort to do these things and many companies neeed a specialized role where someone is only doing this thing…
But anyone can do it and learn it. And not anyone can learn how to program.
