Red pill: truely accept that design is very important, make the hard effort to improve your aesthetic work over time to improve your personal taste, listen to graphic designers and learn their taste from them. Become the master of both aesthetics and engineering, reap the significant rewards as one of the few that can navigate the compromise between the disciplines. The cost is that the world slowly becomes terrifyingly ugly, because you have to opened your eyes to hideous monstrous graph everywhere; even a simple sign on a road can make you physically ill. You are surrounded by evil, currently your mind is just closed to it. One friend of mine struggles to go to shopping, because the screeching noise of barbaric design hurts their psyche. You already struggle against the cesspit of bad engineering that surrounds you everyday: take the red pill and more than double your suffering.
Blue pill: keep ignorant of graphic design, enjoy mocking the trivial and meaningless exploits of designers, laugh at their talk of the energy or feelings of a font (idolising even just one minute part of a single character), remain happy in your ignorance. The cost is that you will always feel something is missing in your life and work. There is a worthwhile struggle for meaning in the dark arts, you will miss out on the pleasure of creating form from the void.
There are profound joys of creating something beautiful. Engineering is easier but more restricted because the definition of engineering is compromising to meet limitations: design has fewer limits and they are mostly created by your society within your own mind. A aesthetic sense will get you widespread respect, because people can appreciate it. Great engineering is a lonely vice that is usually not even appreciated by your fellow engineers. As an engineer you can subversively affect graphic design and you often have massive control over aesthetics. Comparatively, graphic designers are chained artists that often bleed away their soul slowly until they become corporate zombies with minds of mush.
> As an engineer you can subversively affect graphic design and you often have massive control over aesthetics.
For most of my career I was a hybrid designer/developer. There's definitely a dialog between them, and engineering enables and constrains some elements of the esthetics, but in general I would say it works the other direction more often than not.
That's why when I read about von Tiesenhausen’s Law of Engineering Design, it really rang true for me: "If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist’s concept."
We're just talking about esthetics, rather than functionality or purpose or process, which are much more of a give-and-take.
This is why I eventually just moved straight over to design: so much of product development is path-dependent, and designers exert a ton of leverage just by creating documents upstream of engineers.
There is also a third place to go where you respect good design, designers, and their work. You learn enough about it to enjoy it, but maybe not enough to do it well yourself. You accept that because you invest time in other things.
You can enjoy music without being a professional musician.
My day job is "artist" and the "everything looks terrible forever" scenario depicted here is rather exaggerated, IMHO. I can enjoy something pretty when I see it but I can also let ugly things slide by without worrying about it.
Some pieces are great, but others are infuriating, like the fact that I can't disable pointer or scroll wheel acceleration without installing 3rd party software.
At least they let me invert the scroll wheel so that its behavior matches everything else in the world.
Blue pill: keep ignorant of graphic design, enjoy mocking the trivial and meaningless exploits of designers, laugh at their talk of the energy or feelings of a font (idolising even just one minute part of a single character), remain happy in your ignorance. The cost is that you will always feel something is missing in your life and work. There is a worthwhile struggle for meaning in the dark arts, you will miss out on the pleasure of creating form from the void.
There are profound joys of creating something beautiful. Engineering is easier but more restricted because the definition of engineering is compromising to meet limitations: design has fewer limits and they are mostly created by your society within your own mind. A aesthetic sense will get you widespread respect, because people can appreciate it. Great engineering is a lonely vice that is usually not even appreciated by your fellow engineers. As an engineer you can subversively affect graphic design and you often have massive control over aesthetics. Comparatively, graphic designers are chained artists that often bleed away their soul slowly until they become corporate zombies with minds of mush.