This is all about what you define a designer as. For me a designer who isn't knee deep in code and data driven rich UX is useless.
Also, I think it's so boring and limiting to keep talking about such deep separations between skillsets.
It's all so simple: Good generalists/polymaths are more useful than one or the other.
Anyone who buckets themselves into an either/or is doomed to a limited career. Anyone who just says fuck it and does it all and keeps trying until they get it right is a far more useful asset.
So it's simple; this is not a golden age of designers, it's a golden age for smart multi-talented cross-skilled people. As it always has been and always will be. No amount of chirruping from one side of the fence or the other will change that. - If you are on a side of the fence then you are already limited.
I totally agree, but I see more job openings describing hyper-specialists than "smart multi-talented cross-skilled people". Maybe who posted the job opening is like that, and he or she doesn't like competition around.
Once I lost an opportunity just because I didn't know what a particular acronym stood for. It was said the acronym was a prerequisite for the job.
I guess I'm talking from a founder perspective. It's this 'design co-founder' focus that suddenly people are imaginating out of the sky.
What does design focus mean? Does it mean that it looks pretty or that it loads quickly? Because if it's just looks pretty then great, you have a co-founder for pretty looking stuff who doesn't know how to incorporate the company, do share options, hammer out some SQL, connect to an API, fire off some marketing emails, make the app scale well, call up some lawyers, write a privacy policy and evaluate seven different authentication mechanisms... I guess I don't get what a design cofounder is. What is he/she?
The most successful startup will have: AN EXPERT IN EVERYTHING.
So we've moved from focusing on tech founders to saying 'oh thank god we're finally focused on design'.
Bullshit! It's always been important, it always will be, this stinks of people connecting invisible threads to make an argument for a particular type of person which I would seriously question the validity of in a real boot strapping environment.
Tech startup founder: You code, you hack, you chat, you design, you build, you forget to sleep, you sleep too much, you get drunk, you build some more. Cherry picking individual skillsets out of that as a golden child or focus is just blog filling nonsense.
