> I majored in engineering — it’s almost a badge of
pride to build something that looks awful.
I dislike this attitude, for me it is very reminiscent of the way people just shut down when math comes up. "I hate math" and that's it. I'm not a math person, my brain doesn't work that way. On and on. There is even a perverse sort of pride in it. Why not do the work, why not try to get better, why not try to expand into things we're not good at yet.
I've written off aesthetics my entire coding career (15 years), blaming color-blindness, but exactly in the way you speak. I often wonder whether design is even a thing I could get better at. I'm reminded of a Dummies book I read about Real Estate that essentially said a Real Estate agent with 10 years of experience could be turbo, or they could have just repeated the first year ten times. It's nice to see articles like this that tear down some of the mystery.
Another force here, using your example, is that someone pushing themselves from Algebra to Trigonometry might not be as valuable to them as someone who repairs Honda Civics studying how Ferrari's are built. I've seen people shut down to new concepts hundreds of times, but there's some solace in the idea that maybe they're improving their lives in other ways that they find meaningful.
I dislike this attitude, for me it is very reminiscent of the way people just shut down when math comes up. "I hate math" and that's it. I'm not a math person, my brain doesn't work that way. On and on. There is even a perverse sort of pride in it. Why not do the work, why not try to get better, why not try to expand into things we're not good at yet.