Designer often prioritize design over user experience.

Custom mouse cursors, unaccessible images, non-obvious buttons, non-standard interactions, strobing lights, a million parallaxes.

A lot of designers think that "pretty" is the same as "usable".

Most devs I know, don't care about "clean code" itself, what they care about is _robustness_. If getting something to work requires thousands of lines of html, css, and javascript, then I can guarantee you that something is gonna look broken on some browser in some viewport size.

When designing you need to keep any mediums limitations in mind, be it paper or the web. The medium is the message. Browsers are buggy implementations of mediocre standards, if you design oblivious to their limitations things will inevitably be buggy, ugly and weird.

Designers can't just live in an ivory tower of auto-layouts that actually work, and have devs magically weave their dreams from garbage.

If we just replaced the web with figma (or if Figma had a runtime like Rive, to just run the entire thing with the web as the platform), I'd be more than happy, not being editor-first is the biggest flaw of the web, and figmas auto-layout is a lot less sucky. But until then, (good) designers have to learn the basics of the tech stack too, and figma does not help in that department.

This is a very skewed definition / classification of “design” and “designer”. Basically, anything you think is a waste of time is called “design”, and anything you think is good is called something else. This is just the professional version of highschool tribalist stereotyping and bullying. It’s a complete departure from reality. A just-decent designer will do what you’re asking. Not ‘big tech’ decent, not ‘Silicon Valley’ decent, just…an actual competent designer of which there are plenty.

For the record, I am a developer, always have been, and have been so for some time. I just don’t share these delusions of grandeur.

You realize that I was mocking op, by replacing their use of "developer" with "designer"?

Good to hear from somebody that values design. Without people like you, all websites would look like amazon

Both as right, and wrong at the same time: developers have the knowledge of what's needed to run the service, and they know that if you make things too complicated it will be too costly to maintain and the organization will grind to halt. But the designers have the view of the users and they know that if the product is too unergonomic to use, there won't be any users to pay the bills. Both need to understand the other's POV in order to ship sustainable software that is actually used.

Developers often need to be challenged to find a solution to a problem that on first glance seems infeasible. The first instinct of developers is not always correct, what appears to be difficult may turn out to be easy. Of course some things do turn out to be legitimately hard but when developers design things they put too much trust in their instincts.

Developers sometimes also need to be forced to accept complexity that they don’t personally see the point of. For example animations and transitions may appear pointless to developers as they don’t have any function: no APIs are called. However for users, especially non-technical users, animations can be very useful to show the flow of how various UI modes are connected, and to communicate subliminally as many users don’t read text prompts.

If you let developers call the shots then they will choose whatever UI makes the code as simple as possible, because they spend more time looking at code than the actual product, in contrast to users who never see the code at all.

Yeah. If they say it's not possible, they probably are just lazy. Concerning animations that's what is missing from Figma and I think for similar reasons they're missing from many products.

Given the recent size and snappiness of modern UIs I think it's a bad thing.

Too much design, too little value.

As a dev I second this. Dev's are usually far removed from any knowledge of design, hopefully that changes.

And designers seem to be far removed from perfomance of smartphones and download speed.

What? Smartphones are faster than computers from a few years ago. Smartphones have been running Fortnite since at least 2018. I really wonder what your designers ask from you that is more demanding than that.

Smartphones are faster but the web apps are still slow or even worse, slower.

Many useless design elements drain the battery and take time to render.

Fortnite isn't a web app and I doubt that Figma was used by the game designers.