Apologies for the length...quit smoking this morning, so I'm on a bit of a rant...
Like many others, I think your best option might just be to find a more comfortable place to work. If this is your dream company and you just can't leave, your best bet may be to contact a lawyer if you think you're being squeezed out of your job for unscrupulous reasons. On the other hand, to the defense of the principle your employer espouses: a good development team practicing the kind of agile development he's talking about - is going to design the system, regardless. That is, I've worked with a lot of developers using different methodologies, and my current team is one of the most customer-focused that I've seen. Using a variant of the extreme programming method, combined with strict discipline to design and build the heart of what's being requested, they are able to build new, highly usable features into our site in very short time. A few things about the above statement: My development team has an interaction designer passing them the features. However, they are very skilled at building usable software already, so I don't have to bog them down in the tiniest of details for them to "get it right". Also, "a good development team" as mentioned above will likely cost them more than a single interaction designer. Your employer may believe that switching his current team to an agile method will suddenly obviate the need for designers, and there's a very small chance he's right (after all, badly designed features aren't the same as "utter failure", they are still features). However, more likely than not, he'll have a very hard time instilling the discipline necessary to get design right the first time with his existing staff. Again, whether you try to make the case to stay or not is really up to whether you think this company really wants you there. But if you're going to make the case, I would make it based on the skills you brought (and bring) to the table, rather than the benefit your title provides to the company. You could throw books, web sites and expert opinions at them by the bucket-load, but when it comes down to it, it's you they hired and you are the one with the skills to help them succeed. Regarding the use of your designs for the next few years of development: Unless you are superhuman and designed every aspect of every workflow in the system ahead of time, I highly doubt they'll get much further than "skin deep" into your design before they'll raise a ton of questions about its intricacies and nuances. If you've left the company, they're going to have to get someone to answer those questions, and their customers aren't likely to be very specific about the solutions. That, to me, may be your "in" from the designers perspective. One more thing...this may just be my personal preference, but it wouldn't hurt to do a little more development on the front-end, for your team. Not necessarily building the production code, but building practical HTML prototypes for your team can greatly increase its efficiency and obviate the need for your dev-team manager to hire an experienced UI developer (which he'll need if he's getting rid of designers - and they aren't cheap). -- Bryan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=33867 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
