There are plenty of ways that designers get their hands dirty in production, but this is enrichment to improve their design capabilities, not skills they will put 10,000 hours into. I guess I'm not so much against "designers must know how to code" as I am against "designers must code on the job and be good at it." To me, this de-values design itself and takes away valuable cycles from its practice.
In experimental prototyping situations, you'll see designers learn the non-design skills they need to build their prototypes and express their ideas. That's great, but we must never mistake prototypes for products (prototyping is a distinct activity from production with different goals). So a designer might code, but they might not test well, or write comments, or any of the other million things you need to do for production-level programs.
I've been in hiring situations before, and I often find those who identify as "designer programmers" to be neither great designers nor great programmers. There are of course some great designgineers out there, but they probably won't apply to our company :(
Disclaimer: I'm a self-identified programming language designer whose niche field necessitates programming (since we are designing for programmers...duh!), but I have a lot of design studio experience working as a prototyper (never as the designer) on more conventional areas (web, mobile, even old-style surface when it was a table and not a tablet). Not Irish, just typical mixed up American with Scottish and Irish heritage (among everything else).
In experimental prototyping situations, you'll see designers learn the non-design skills they need to build their prototypes and express their ideas. That's great, but we must never mistake prototypes for products (prototyping is a distinct activity from production with different goals). So a designer might code, but they might not test well, or write comments, or any of the other million things you need to do for production-level programs.
I've been in hiring situations before, and I often find those who identify as "designer programmers" to be neither great designers nor great programmers. There are of course some great designgineers out there, but they probably won't apply to our company :(
Disclaimer: I'm a self-identified programming language designer whose niche field necessitates programming (since we are designing for programmers...duh!), but I have a lot of design studio experience working as a prototyper (never as the designer) on more conventional areas (web, mobile, even old-style surface when it was a table and not a tablet). Not Irish, just typical mixed up American with Scottish and Irish heritage (among everything else).