Back in 2018, they called someone with development and design skills a 🌈 unicorn 🦄. This turned out to be a fade. No one talks about these unicorns anymore.

I think part of that reason is that design thinking from developers has become much more normalized, it's implicit now. Any front end developer will have some level of intuitive sense for when things can be improved. But it's something that's explicit to learn. If you're interested in speaking design and a hybrid role, what's that turn out like? And how do you do it?

How I Work With Design

As with most things, there's a spectrum you are for how hybrid you can be. I'm fully confident that I can resharpen my design skills and adjust my placement on the spectrum one day, but for now I've decided it's best for me to strictly be a developer that has some design chops.

At my current workplace, I'm firmly on the developer team. But by speaking the design language I've picked up the tendencies of our design team and have established a great working relationship. I understand the priorities (maximum value), and the focus (brand consistency) and it helps me be collaborative. I can freestyle gaps in the mock-ups and be a part of co-designing.

This strong sync has allowed me to lead a small project, side-loading a bit of a design system and building bridges between Figma and our codebase. I help organize the Figma components to match the codebase, and build componentized code components that our team will feel comfortable using.

This is honestly not that special, except that it is considering I’m finally doing it as my job. Navigating my brand through the hybrid role wasn’t easy.

The Hybrid Branding Challenge

I've had frustrating conversations because of my dual interests in design and code. Coming out of University being recruited and interviewing at companies I’d be asked what role I wanted - and for some reason was never understood.

I just wanted to be a developer that worked closely with designers and the product team, to be able to hear from users and use that to fuel my priorities as a developer. I lost out on a couple jobs because I didn’t define myself as either a designer or developer.

After one rejection with this feedback I doubled down on my “Developer” brand. All my portfolio content was thought out - both UX and UI, but the messaging changed.

Conclusion

Overall, it’s really crappy that the tech industry hypes unique skills but that companies don’t trust juniors with said skills. I ended up going the startup route in order to build that trust and reputation. I’m interested to see what opportunities will come my way now that I’m here.

If you’re new to the industry and have hybrid interests (not just design/dev, pm/dev or anything else too) feel free to hit my line - would love to chat. askalburgi@gmail.com