UI engineer, an awkward role?

I have been thinking about this topic a few years ago. I was very confused at one time. Although I have not been doing web page reconstruction for three years now, some people still ask about my experience and current situation, and there are always some The reality is stimulating me to think about this issue.

At the same time, these work experiences and ways of thinking have always deeply influenced me, so even if this is a topic that will offend people no matter how I talk about it, I have to face it bravely.

Starting from a "cognition"

Everyone who is engaged in the Internet industry knows that there is a job called "artist", of course He has many other names. For example, those in the south like to call themselves "page boy" and "cutting boy", while tx people like to call themselves "construction", which means the type of work that builds the page structure.

Although the art and construction of these names does not look so high-end, it cannot be said to be discriminatory, but we don't like these names very much. Moreover, in the early years, the work of real artists could be done from design to implementation (now called full-stack designers).

So, when did this position start to become a bit low?

This may start with the book "Web Page Reconstruction" and the birth of this position.

Reconstruction means overthrowing the past and rebuilding new rules and systems. For artists, since the process involved is relatively long, it is inevitably difficult to make every link perfect, or even terrible (full-stack engineer? Haha).

The result is that a large number of employees with average quality have taken advantage of the Internet trend and entered the art position. In the end, they can't do well in design and writing code. The final impression left is that the artists are making something shoddy.

Since there are too many titles for this role, it would be better for me to use UI Engineer, at least a relatively new title.

Since it is a new title, there will inevitably be some new positioning. Taking tx as an example, UI engineers in many departments have also been classified into the T family (technical family) channel (there was a period of time in the design family) ).

However, although the rank channel is divided into technical families, the staffing is often in the design department, or follows the product line. Then the UI engineers in the design department have become the ones who know the most about code among designers and the best about design among programmers.

This slightly misplaced identity relationship has also confused us. Even if you are a designer, you cannot produce a decent design draft; if you are an engineer, just making pages and animations does not seem to be engineering.

The only word we often talk about is "user experience", but user experience is a huge category. All we can control is the performance of the page, cool animations, etc.

These things can indeed improve the experience to some extent, but how effective they are is difficult to quantify.

In recent years, in the environment where various JS frameworks have become popular, not many people are willing to pay attention to UI things and those who have special preferences for pixels in the front-end industry. .

I myself also have this trend. After being exposed to a more comprehensive research and development process, it is difficult to maintain the attention to UI details and the ultimate user experience that I once pursued.

This may also just show that for certain types of products or products at certain stages, UI details are not that important.

For the user experience design department that attaches great importance to user experience, it is difficult for coders affiliated with the design department to be valued and promoted.

This is the dilemma of UI engineers.

If you want to get out of this predicament, switching to PHP development is a good choice. There are a lot of free courses on PHP中文网. You can study by yourself for a while first.

Author: Ji Guang, who once worked for Taobao/Tencent/JD.com, is currently the head of the mall front-end group of Midea Group E-commerce Co., Ltd., has translated "Wonderful CSS", and is a group certified lecturer.