Elon’s Twitter Takeover Will Kill UX
On Friday, Elon assumed control of Twitter, immediately firing most of the C suite, dozens of executives, and then swinging a reaper’s blade through the ranks of employees he could reach. Nonsensically, he demanded engineers print out the code they worked on over the last two months (before reversing course and telling them to shred the documents they’ve printed, perhaps realizing what a breach of OPSEC and common sense this was).
However, for the world’s richest man who purchased Twitter in an act of apparent hubris, this reveals a critical point in his worldview. For him, producers are valuable, critics are not.
As someone who got a degree in humanities, I value the critical process. Creating work is hard, painful labor, but the act of looking at existing work with a critical eye, understanding the process behind it and ways to improve it, it an entirely different skillset. For UX, much of the work is critical rather than productive. I mean that in the literal sense: it takes less time to make a wireframe than it does to effectively and productively alter an existing layout.
This mental labor is far harder to see and to many managers or CEOs, UX Designers are the No Machine, constantly shooting ideas down. Lower-level designers are the Yes Machine, getting tasks done.
