I wish I would have spent the last three years becoming a better developer rather than destroying my confidence by being a rejected designer.

As messed up and non welcoming as it can be, I feel way more accepted as a developer than I ever did as a designer.

I wonder if there’s something about being a developer—we all get told were wrong a trillion times a day by a computer that literally needs everything parsed down to ones and zeros for it.

Our feedback first comes from a machine.

No matter who we are, our work is rejected first.

As a designer, there’s nothing external telling us we’re doing it wrong until we share our designs with *people.*

Our feedback first comes from people, who are sordidly biased. Some of us will systematically be rejected repeatedly by design. Others are rarely rejected.

It makes me wonder if this was why it was harder for me to find the kinship with designer colleagues that I’ve found with developer colleagues.

I’m sad thinking about how much hurt being a designer brought me. Perhaps ironically I’d be better off had I listened to my rejectors.

I have trauma from interviewing for design roles. It’s a song and dance where everyone wants to know how you think. But they often don’t.

Often they want to see that you’ve done the exact same work in the same sort of setting with the same trend-laden UIs.

Process is a lie.

I’m not suggesting interviewing for dev roles is better. The charade is a mess everywhere. The tools they use to torture and haze are just different.

But there’s something about this lie that design seems to perpetuate as a community. That it’s about research and thoughtfulness.

But I still see designers who want words to be reragged to be on certain lines or who are worried that in Firefox it adds 10 pixels of padding.

When I push back as a developer, “we want the design to be stable so more people can access it, which means UI compromises”—

Things fall apart. The widowed word or loose button is a red herring.

The ego of the design and its designer so often takes precedent over the need of the user.

I guess I’ve always been this way.

I guess I’ve always prioritised stability of a design over its polish. And perhaps this was and is my demise for being a successful designer.

I feel the kind of rejection of being stood up for a date. I feel the hurt of having invested years into a relationship that I’ll now need to let go of. I feel the anxiousness and fear before you say the words “I think we should break up.”