The graph containing "We are, perhaps, uniquely qualified" is problematic.
To provide a bit more context, this was motivated by how opaque I found a lot of the structuralist literature when I first read it. Saussure, especially, never provides a straightforward description of his model for language (though, in fairness, the book was actually written by his grad students posthumously, based on his course notes). You have to pay attention to his many, disparate descriptions of positive and negative relationships between words, and ignore his entirely separate model of "horizontal" and "vertical" relationships. I do genuinely think that people who are trained in computer science are better at distilling and describing these kinds of models.
But in any case, you're right that it's not a load bearing part of my argument. If I have to choose between expanding upon my point or removing it, I should probably remove it.
This makes me want to stand up for frontend developers who are also good overall designers.
My point is that "good design" isn't a fixed set of practices. Consider the likely differences in the frontends for a web+mobile app, a mobile-only app, and an iOS-only app. I'd expect the mobile-only frontends to be "thicker" than the web+mobile frontends, and the iOS-only frontend to be thickest of all. And, if your team is comprised of iOS experts, this would be perfectly reasonable; trying to push everything into the backend would just add unnecessary friction.
You still, of course, have to split the frontend/backend continuum somewhere. But when there's a single frontend, where you make that cut isn't nearly as important.
I wondered for a moment how coincidental it was to write about the original surface/depth spectrum then later talk about buying makeup.
Not a coincidence. There's a reason the structuralists were specifically interested in the masculine/feminine binary; Bourdieu called gender the "master binary" because it gets aligned with so many other continuums. My goal isn't to harp on gender stereotypes as such, but to point out how easy it is to conflate the technical with the non-technical. This was the best, punchiest example I could think of. Maybe there's a better one out there, though.
Hey Aaron, thanks for the feedback.
To provide a bit more context, this was motivated by how opaque I found a lot of the structuralist literature when I first read it. Saussure, especially, never provides a straightforward description of his model for language (though, in fairness, the book was actually written by his grad students posthumously, based on his course notes). You have to pay attention to his many, disparate descriptions of positive and negative relationships between words, and ignore his entirely separate model of "horizontal" and "vertical" relationships. I do genuinely think that people who are trained in computer science are better at distilling and describing these kinds of models.
But in any case, you're right that it's not a load bearing part of my argument. If I have to choose between expanding upon my point or removing it, I should probably remove it.
My point is that "good design" isn't a fixed set of practices. Consider the likely differences in the frontends for a web+mobile app, a mobile-only app, and an iOS-only app. I'd expect the mobile-only frontends to be "thicker" than the web+mobile frontends, and the iOS-only frontend to be thickest of all. And, if your team is comprised of iOS experts, this would be perfectly reasonable; trying to push everything into the backend would just add unnecessary friction.
You still, of course, have to split the frontend/backend continuum somewhere. But when there's a single frontend, where you make that cut isn't nearly as important.
Not a coincidence. There's a reason the structuralists were specifically interested in the masculine/feminine binary; Bourdieu called gender the "master binary" because it gets aligned with so many other continuums. My goal isn't to harp on gender stereotypes as such, but to point out how easy it is to conflate the technical with the non-technical. This was the best, punchiest example I could think of. Maybe there's a better one out there, though.