[this is gonna sound a bit meta and weird, but bear with me]
Not everyone gets it.
If you have advanced knowledge and expertise in a certain field of study, or even just a knack for it as a layman, you could be speaking Truth about it, your every word advancing the field and breaking new ground, but you will never be heard or understood by the majority. Every field of specialization has this mass of rote practitioners, text-book bureaucrats who perceive it only as it's taught, as it exists, and can not visualize it further than its current state.
Let me repeat that again: for every field of art, science, work, study, etc. the great majority of its practitioners can not see the future of their craft, all their mind can conceive is how things are NOW. If they could see past today, they would invent the future.
That's why if you're lucky enough to be "peerless"; when you're least understood by everyone (and I don't mean in an emotional "kumbaya" sense, but as in research) when your Idea has no google hits, when you can't find a reference text, a conference, or a consortium addressing your questions .. it's those times when you need to take a deep breath and ask yourself: Am I batshit insane, stupid, or do I have a genuinely novel idea?
A good metric is when you have few peers. The more prominent they're, and noted for their smarts, the better. If you find yourself corresponding with the primary sources of a new art, or science, or a new field of mathematics, you know you're breaking new ground.
So, just because a bunch of people shoot your idea down doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. It might be that you're talking above the masses, and addressing only a select few specialists, perhaps in a highly adapted "domain-specific language" (the exact terminology might be different, specially if you're a bright layman; but you mourn just the same, your shared agonizing pain, and you're understood, at least for now, by just by a handful few.)
I am constantly frustrated by being "peerless" in terms of interaction design. When I talk about how things are broken, I get blank stares. People rabidly defend the status quo. Most interaction designers are button-twiddlers.
What keeps me sane is A) knowing that there are a few people out there, even if I don't talk to them, who must be on the same page. I use their software and it doesn't make me want to puke.
And B) I have a group of friends who understand me. None of them are interaction designers or even heavily invested into creating software (with the exception of my equally crazy husband), however.
I think this actually helps them get me, because they're not chockful of preconceived notions. I can tell them, "Imagine if you could..." and they go "Yeah! And what if...?" -- my friends who are more nerdy, about either ui or code, go "But x already does y." (Which isn't even remotely what I was talking about.)
It's like the people who are actually in my field(s) think in terms of Concrete Nouns and merely use those Nouns Concrete in various recombinated forms, so if you try to come up with something that doesn't already exist, their brains break, and they barf out "But, ...".
Pardon the self-absorbed rant, but the downside to this is that not only am I lacking good outlets for discussing and growing my ideas, I'm lacking good outlets for smart constructive criticism. And I miss that.
I have mixed feelings on this. While I can understand most comments, I must say that it's very, very hard to design blind. By blind, I mean, with no directions, or, in other words, with not objectives directly pointed out by Twitter.
I think most of the commenters think that I've made a full, complete, functional redesign of Twitter, while it's not (I focused mainly on typography and white space). There are still a lot of decisions I needed to not think about because I didn't have time, neither it was the purpose of the exercise.
Think of my realign as a spruce up. Not final, but eye-opening in a certain way :-)
Besides, it's hard to beat a design team that works at Twitter's HQ, that knows what they need as a company, have user data, and can test and iterate almost every day.
Oh, and thanks HN for making this possible, BTW. :-)
"Plus, the dream is completed by being offered to flight to Zendesk headquarters in San Francisco for a couple of days." - sounds to me like he will be working remotely.
Ahh, for some reason I interpreted that as being for an interview of sorts. It didn't even occur to me that he could be working remotely. I must be more old-school than I imagined ;-)
