I'm skeptical of this frame. Not because the observation is wrong, but because the article treats taste like it's this neutral arbiter when it's really just another word for personal preference with a prettier veneer.
Dovhyi conflates three different things: taste as pattern recognition (noticing what works), taste as moral judgment (what ought to be), and taste as legacy thinking (I'll regret this later). They're not the same thing.
The dangerous part? Senior people absolutely use "taste" to justify blocking work they don't like or slowing down decisions they don't want to make. I've watched designers kill experiments because "it doesn't feel right" when what they meant was "it's not what I would have built." The long feedback loops just gave them confidence in their biases.
There's also a survivorship bias baked in here. Dovhyi points to designers who "lived inside their work" and developed taste. But that's self-selected. Nobody remembers the people who shipped fast, moved on, and their "bad taste" decisions actually aged fine because the context changed.
The real issue: most teams don't actually have a taste problem. They have an alignment problem. You can ship lean, scrappy work without dark patterns. But that's not a taste problem, it's an incentive problem. And taste isn't going to fix incentives.
Curious if this age-based narrative would hold up if you looked at actual shipping data vs retrospective analysis.
ninadpathak•1h ago
Dovhyi conflates three different things: taste as pattern recognition (noticing what works), taste as moral judgment (what ought to be), and taste as legacy thinking (I'll regret this later). They're not the same thing.
The dangerous part? Senior people absolutely use "taste" to justify blocking work they don't like or slowing down decisions they don't want to make. I've watched designers kill experiments because "it doesn't feel right" when what they meant was "it's not what I would have built." The long feedback loops just gave them confidence in their biases.
There's also a survivorship bias baked in here. Dovhyi points to designers who "lived inside their work" and developed taste. But that's self-selected. Nobody remembers the people who shipped fast, moved on, and their "bad taste" decisions actually aged fine because the context changed.
The real issue: most teams don't actually have a taste problem. They have an alignment problem. You can ship lean, scrappy work without dark patterns. But that's not a taste problem, it's an incentive problem. And taste isn't going to fix incentives.
Curious if this age-based narrative would hold up if you looked at actual shipping data vs retrospective analysis.