I don't agree with the statement "... there’s probably no two groups of people who understand each other less than designers and developers". I never had problems with the designers working with me. All it takes for both parties is patience, mutual respect, communication and accepting that they're professionals at what they do and I'm a professional at what I do. It's simple as that.
I’m a front-end developer, so I get to experience this battleground every day. I expect my designers to come up with stuff that’s going to work well for UX, and I expect the back-end developers to code in a maintainable and performant way. Meanwhile I sit in the middle as a buffer and tie everything together.
It does, but it also (in my experience) comes down to those "in the middle" working hard to better educate designers and back-end developers about the kind of thing you need from them (whether that's a design that can actually be implemented in HTML, or ensuring that HTTP semantics are correctly preserved by application code).
"Designers are from Venus and developers are from Mars. And they won’t ever really understand each other."
Utter nonsense. Or maybe it's true at giant enterprise silos more than startups and that's why I shy away from large corporate work. People at startups are a different breed than those at large companies, regardless of job role, and have to be interdisciplinary rather than divisive. That's the thrust of my talk tonight - Designers vs Product Managers - who's more important at startups?
No, because you're just extending an olive branch after the inflammatory attention-grabbing part. You lost me at the divisive generalization, even if I personally fall into the camp of "designers who can program".
