Are companies who only hire designers who are also programmers missing out on better designers?

I'm not sure what the question is implying via using the term "delusional". I mean, if a company (like Google) is heavily into engineering and has its processes and policies centered around an engineering mindset, it's understandable that the people it'd want to hire have some degree of engineering prowess. Is it then implied that these companies are delusional in some way? The only way I can reason that this rule to "hire designers who can also program" is misguided is if: The company's competitive advantage is design and is reliant on designers Engineers or PM's w/ some design skills cannot provide the same quality of design necessary to succeed All the top designers have no interest in implementing their designs Not many companies have 1. as an absolute requirement (e.g., Google). Most startups get by 2. w/ founding PM's + engineers. I find 3. hard to believe, as every designer I know has been frustrated by the quality of an engineering implementation versus the provided mocks, and all the good ones who didn't have HTML/CSS knowledge have asked for help learning it. In short, the company may be passing by some kickass pure designers by requiring some programming knowledge, but delusion rests on the designer if they believe such a requirement will doom a company to failure.

What you really need are not designers who are engineers, but designers who are aware of engineering issues enough to be able to make the design pragmatic.  A pragmatic design takes into account engineering realities of the technology used/available, information architecture, difficulty of coding, resources, and deadlines.  This is synonymous to a building architect needing to understand materials, HVAC, electrical, etc. when designing a building. A pragmatic design is also designed to be phased and scalable.  It has an essential core that if completed will provide the key functionality and usability.  It also has additional 'phases' that incrementally improve the design, but if pared back to that core can still stand on its own. As mentioned earlier, you also need a designer who speaks the 'language' of both engineers and customers/users.  This means a designer considered credible by the engineers who doesn't request/design something absurdly difficult, and can create specs that are easy for engineers to read and follow.  That is often a different audience than people who actually review and approve a spec.  A designer considered 'one of the development team' and respected by engineers is far more effective. When I look for great designers, I look for people who are strongly center brained, people with equal, large measures of both creativity/artistry and rational, logical thought.  Also people who can clearly hold their own with both engineers and marketing/product types, who can act as a bridge from business requirements to developers, all the while representing the users.

Delusional is a harsh word, but in general, I think it takes two different kinds of people to be really good UI designers and then really good software developers.  It's always good to hire people with a little bit of broad knowledge into their counterparts expertise, so that, for example, a UI designer doesn't spend hours on a mockup that is technically impossible to implement and reflects little understanding of the back end.  To extend this paradigm, there is also a different between a UI designer and a visual or graphic designer.

I think the most important thing isn't so much that your designers can code but that your design team can communicate with your engineering team. Without having at least some CS or engineering background (and the analytical horsepower that's highly correlated with that), a designer is going to have trouble understanding what the engineers are saying they want to build or why something is difficult, and likewise he/she is likely to have trouble using sufficiently precise language to express what's important to engineers. I don't think all of your designers need to be able to do this, necessarily, but your design leaders and most interaction-focused designers definitely do.   Otherwise, if a designer can/wants to implement his/her own designs, that's great. There's no doubt in my mind that a huge reason that Quora developed a fairly full-featured site so quickly is that Rebekah prototypes in code, and that dramatically cuts the total resource cost of a feature.

Great question.   The term "Jack of all trades, and master of none" seems apropos here. It really depends on what type of coding they do.  If it's simply HTML, CSS and a little JS, then that would definitely fly, but if they want someone to design and also do hardcore app dev, they are a bit delusional.  I heard someone say that developers are from Mars & designers are from Venus, and couldn't agree more.  Developers rely heavily on the left-brain(analysis & logic), whereas designers rely on the right-brain (emotion & aesthetics).    From a business perspective, could you get the same quality of work on either side out of this prototypical person?  Doubtful.  Also, I don't believe I could rely on a person in that dual role to get much done.  Task-switching would eat up a disproportionate amount of their time compared to someone with singular focus.  Unless you're dealing with a bona fide Renaissance Man, their knowledge  of the respective subject matters would surely be shallower than that of  a specialist. Short answer:  Yeah, they're nuts.

Realistically, you dont need 25x developers for everything. Companies like Google can afford to hire post-modern philosophy Phd's for secretary positions and can hire comp sci. Phds from top schools to write Javascript.  Unless you are Google, the job should be matched to the skills people have. Most things are routine and the people do not have to be especially good programmers to implement them.  I do not hire AI or machine learning Phds  for 150k a year to write CSS. The reality is that most companies do not have enough design work for a full time designer. I would rather have 5 designer/programmers who were ok, than 4 engineers and a full-time designer.  Good design comes from trying a large number of possible designs and choosing the best one (that is how Apple and many of the best designers do it). You might need some good engineers for some things, but expecting your employees to be 25x at everything is unrealistic and will impair the performance of your company. If a person designs without regard to the implementation (design perspective), the implementation may be inelegant and difficult/expensive to maintain and modify. If a person designs with only the implementation in mind, but not how people will interact with the data (engineering prospective) the design may be maintainable and separated into independent components, but may not be as usable. When designing applications and workflow, you are always making trade-offs between human usability and ease of implementation/maintainability. A designer+engineer is best able to make those trade-offs.