Engineer, product, and design roles are converging: companies seek designers who can build and engineers with stronger product sense.

Startups are beginning to invert the traditional design-to-engineer ratio, with some new companies planning to hire two designers for every one engineer, reversing the typical 1:15 design-to-engineering balance.

“Maybe we'll have like two designers and one engineer.”

At Cursor, hiring managers meet candidates three or four times before a hire is finalized, replacing the single 30-minute interview model.

“You might meet three times, right? You might meet four times as a hiring manager versus before that person actually is like you know, fully in.”

Shipping code is not a requirement for designers at Snap, contrary to an industry trend pressuring designers to code.

“It's definitely not a requirement to ship code on the design team.”