Answer: Namely, because he is a fictitious character.
The article writers contention that programmers should also have solid HCI knowledge is not necessarily unreasonable, but the comparison to "2 meetings a week, and in a year..." is just ridiculous. Perhaps it was intended to be over the top, but division of labor exists for a good reason. What we really need are amazing back-end and interface engineers who can work with eachother effectively. That, and, as we are seeing with the iPhone becoming mainstream, a cultural willingness to put in extra work on the UI because it matters.
I sorta fancy myself as a do-it-all. I do the design, write the backend, sell it to the client, do the testing, receive the feedback etc. I think it comes from the fact that I've been doing all of this for almost two decades now. I have spent three times more time fiddling in Paint Shop Pro than professional graphic artists in Photoshop. I may not be able to make designs as pretty as 280North but that doesn't stop me from giving it my best.
I've also spent more time and energy configuring Apache and various *nix apps than most sysadmins. But I don't feel comfortable blogging about "Top 5 Unix commands you must know" because I always feel there are 100 others who know more than me so I'll let them blog on these topics. I'll blog about what I'm good at or my own experiences. Which brings me back to the do-it-all topic - if it needs to be done, I want to learn how to do it and do it well. I delegate and outsource when I have resources available but if not, I just do whatever needs to be done. Heinlein's quote seems pretty appropriate here:
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
That is an excellent quote, although it's given me a few more things to strive for in my life. (butcher a hog, set a bone, write a sonnet, die gallantly)
Stop believing Photoshop, Pixelmator, Illustrator, or anything else is too hard. These tools can have a steep learning curve (not as bad as you’d think), but so did programming when you were starting on this game.
Knowing how the tools and palettes work in Photoshop makes you a good designer like knowing Java's syntax makes you a good programmer.
Ask someone who doesn't know how to program to read just a few lines of code. Though it's very naturally readable to you -- and in general, if you didn't know a new language you could try reading it line-by-line like English -- it looks totally impenetrable to them. I've heard people tell me that they have no idea how I do anything [programming] when they look at just a simple script in PHP or Ruby.
Knowing the Photoshop interface is clearly not what makes you a good designer, but in general it is a necessary-but-not-sufficient prerequisite to being really good.
I wish I was better at design. On the other hand there's this wonderful principle called division of labor, and while I might spend 10 hours designing a mediocre website, a good designer will design a great one in half the time. This has actually happened to me. After spending a weekend building out some pages that I thought looked pretty good, my designer friend sent me a photoshop mockup that made me decide to totally scrap what I had made, and go with her design instead.
The most productive I've ever been has been while working in tandem with a good designer, because it frees me up to do what I do best, and that's write code.
Now, I will say that it's important for any web developer to understand principles of design, because understanding what your users actually want is crucial for both backend and frontend work, thinking about user interaction, your data model, etc.
The fact that you toiled at that design for a weekend is part of why your designer friend could turn something around so quickly.
When your designer knows the basics of how programming works, and when your programmer has a grasp of the tenets of design, neither person has to operate as if the other is some sort of stupid magician. It's so refreshing.
Exactly....if one followed the OP's advice, I suppose maybe eventually I could get skilled in design and layout, but as far as I can tell, that is an entire profession in itself, I have enough trouble trying to stay current just on the pure programming stuff. The hours I've spent trying to get something to lay out properly across browsers using CSS could surely have been spent better elsewhere.
I don't personally know many people who understand all of the intricacies of CSS and browser support and writing HTML along with it that aren't programmers.
To me, the design and the implementation are two very different things, and advanced CSS seems to be more in the programming realm (despite its goals to be accessible to the average designer).
I think this article is a perfect example of a what I've perceived as a growing trend of "developers" working at the "top of the stack" with no idea what is really going on under the hood.
That infact there are many, many, many developers who work on projects that are enormous that never see "end users" in the, guy who owns an iMac, sense of the word.
The implication that anyone who writes great software, but lacks "design" skills (in the graphical sense of the word) is so crazy... I wonder if this guy has ever thought about the guy who wrote the embedded realtime system in his car that runs his anti-lock breaks, no WOW factor there.
EDIT: never have I ever wished I had enough karma to vote something down before.
I believe it would be good to look at stuff that is considered well-designed, analyze it and try to understand why it's considered to be well-designed before randomly coming up with stuff in Photoshop.
Edit: let me clarify. This blog post is written by an infantile, narcissistic know-it-all and exudes the odor of vomit and feces. The fact that it appears here lowers my esteem of HN and further confirms my suspicion that the community is full of daft fight club-wannabe group-thinkers. Fuck you very much.
The article writers contention that programmers should also have solid HCI knowledge is not necessarily unreasonable, but the comparison to "2 meetings a week, and in a year..." is just ridiculous. Perhaps it was intended to be over the top, but division of labor exists for a good reason. What we really need are amazing back-end and interface engineers who can work with eachother effectively. That, and, as we are seeing with the iPhone becoming mainstream, a cultural willingness to put in extra work on the UI because it matters.