There’s less than no shame in not having expertise in something outside of your area of expertise, and realizing that’s the case puts you way ahead of the pack. There’s a reason most designers you work with have relevant degrees, and the ones that don’t that are in high level positions in good organizations might as well have them— it’s just a lot more complex than most developers assume. When they realize that, great! When they’re swinging around giant Dunning-Krueger derived overconfident declarations about something you’re designing… not so great.
As a full-time developer for a decade, and in other technical roles for a decade before that, I had a few similar experiences with designers. One repeatedly insisted that Wordpress along with their ramshackle loopdy-looped spaghetti php plugin (still including comments from the tutorials they copied tidbits of code from) was robust enough to enough to replace our very tight Django-based code base that did a hell of a lot more than serve up our website… but they insisted it would take half as long to reimplement it all in php. There wasn’t even a good reason for it– they learned everything they knew about development by osmosis from working on web projects, and a mishmash of articles they read on the topic over the years, and after getting one piece of code to work in a low volume application, thought they were a dual-field specialist. That’s actually pretty rare among designers, but developers that feel that way about design are the norm. We all know what Larry Wall thought the three most important traits were for developers…
As a full-time developer for a decade, and in other technical roles for a decade before that, I had a few similar experiences with designers. One repeatedly insisted that Wordpress along with their ramshackle loopdy-looped spaghetti php plugin (still including comments from the tutorials they copied tidbits of code from) was robust enough to enough to replace our very tight Django-based code base that did a hell of a lot more than serve up our website… but they insisted it would take half as long to reimplement it all in php. There wasn’t even a good reason for it– they learned everything they knew about development by osmosis from working on web projects, and a mishmash of articles they read on the topic over the years, and after getting one piece of code to work in a low volume application, thought they were a dual-field specialist. That’s actually pretty rare among designers, but developers that feel that way about design are the norm. We all know what Larry Wall thought the three most important traits were for developers…