Back when I was in school, Cal’s College of Letters and Science just started a so-called interdisciplinary studies major – a way to become well-versed in multiple areas of study, to prepare for a world where a single skillset was insufficient, a dabbler of many and a master of none.
Always seemed like a lame way to eek out a degree from Berkeley.
At least they got the idea right, in that there is usually a need for someone who can work in multiple areas, though it may not be immediately obvious. Your typical website or webapp requires a few dedicated individuals to build:
- Project manager figures out what people want
- UI and graphics designer hammers out what it’ll look like
- Web developer determines where everything is stored and manipulated
- IT support keeps the servers up and running
Turns out there’s a place for someone between 2 and 3; at LOLapps, I’m the poor guy sitting there trying to make voodoo magic to turn a designer’s pretty graphics into the lingua franca of the internet – HTML, CSS, and Javascript – so backend engineers can work their business logic, make money, and pay our salaries.
We didn’t use to have a dedicated UI engineer. Alas:
- Designers don’t like to touch icky code
- Web developers don’t like dealing with document layouts, positions and color schemes
- Nobody likes dealing with incomplete standards and crappy development environments
Which makes finding other UI engineers especially challenging, when most people have the good sense to stay away. The people I interview for the position were either former artists coding at a 3rd grade level or former engineers with the design prowess of a turd.
I wonder if interdisciplinary studies ever produced an unholy art-comp. sci. studies major. I’d totally hire that guy.