almost 8 years ago from Derek Punsalan, Design
I was poking around Quora but results are probably outdated. From my own experience, I've seen the ratio of designers to developers hover around 1:5. Would love to hear what the ratio is where you work.
I work at an up-and-coming startup and it's pretty much me and around 20 developers. We're always looking for more devs, but design isn't growing much at the moment.
Same
Same
Same.
This seems to be the norm in most places, many companies don't even have a designer. As a designer and developer, I'm sad to say that I have rarely had the opportunity to work with other designers on a project.
I have no idea. I'm taking a wild guess here but I'd peg it at a minimum of 1:20 and could be as much as 1:200.
I work at a company in the Fortune 500 (just out of the 250) with thousands of employees and a similar amount of contractors. The design department on the business side numbers around 10 designers (none are interactive designers). I am unaware of any designers within the IT side (90+% of IT is outsourced).
I get to review some projects that come before a review board before deployment. It is obvious that the "design" was done by developers or product owners, not dedicated designers. I'm trying to change that, but it is not a quick-fix.
1:4 in our team
Caveat: totally unofficial. I don't know what it is now, but when I started ~2 years ago, it was 1-75. Then again, IBM employs a quarter of a million people, and as far as I know, that includes the largest group of designers under a single company (~1000?).
3 designers to 5 developers.
Its closer to 3:3 here. Thats also because we use Meteor for our application, so 2 of the 3 designers also code from time to time and 2 of the 3 designers do development from time to time.
I work at a small design studio called Firebelly Design, which is definitely a design studio (lots of branding and print design), so here it's usually about 2:1 (currently 4 designers, 2 developers).
1 designer to every 15-20 developers.
We're hoping to change that by hiring a few more, so if you feel like working on design for a next generation mobile/desktop operating system (Ubuntu) in London, drop me a line at jouni.helminen@canonical.com :)
Looking for junior/midweight with mobile and web experience.
What types of companies do you work at with this ratio?
2 Designers / 45 Developers
8+ Products that are all interconnected with each other.
I am up to my eye balls in work.
Curious to know if you've requested additional design seats, and if so what type of counter arguments you're receiving.
We get external assistance from contractors to do special tasks that maybe we don't have the time to do, like making a custom icon set for our suite of products, but that's about it for now.
Despite the heavy presence of developers and our heavy work load. We're ahead of everyone else. Development has a backlog of work from us to implement, the reason for this is because out of the 45 developers we may only have about 3 front-end devs that actually implement the work we're doing.
We're actively looking for more front-end devs. I think once the backlog of work that's been completed starts getting implemented quicker we'll need more full-time help with our work load to make sure we keep the pace up.
It's a bit crazy.
1:5 Works out pretty well, We are also all distributed. Then 1 PM to that team as well. We are full stack designers.
1:5. If it's not a design centered company, the ratio is always around 1:5
3 designers - 7 developers.
Shit! lucky designers :)
1:3 in our group
Like many others here, we have a pretty large amount of engineers per designer. 9:2 right now but looking to hire another 4 engineers.
1:4 design dev ratio, IT team of 5, in a company of about 40.
I'm currently stationed as an in-house designer for a company in dental practice management. We built and maintain things like a patient surveys app, practice finance systems, work-flow/time management tools, an e-learning app, a dental real-estate sales site, a job board, a recruitment app, etc.
It occasionally gets quite tough, since I manage;
Just thought I'd explain why I'm in a 1:4 ratio, yet on occasion struggle to keep up. And to be honest, it's a bit weird reading this back, or even writing it in the first place. Like I hadn't looked in the mirror for a while.
We have 2 designers (plus me) and 30 developers but most of them are focused on backend. We have a huge backlog of "design debt" to recover though and we're hiring for both design and front end development.
Designers are never enough, I was the first person with any design skills before I started hiring and people immediately found things for me to do that nobody could tackle before.
1:6 currently. Soon to be 1:10.
Small studio - 1:2
Same ! :)
Um, 10 designers and about 300 developers with the company, though it's more like 1:7 ratio in the office where I work. It's ok, we get along just fine.
We are 2 designers and about 20 developers. Right now were looking for another designer, and even more devs..
Accept remote applicants by any chance?
We are looking for a designer for our London office, so it would be a BIG plus if you are in that area. But we are always open, so please do send us an email, we might change our minds :)
Hey - I didn't see this reply until now, but I'm going to apply :)
Prior experience 1:7, which is somewhat manageable. The engineering heavy startups I've worked with lean towards 1:12. In these scenarios, not all features get immediate design attention and designers are playing a constant game of catch-up.
John Meada's KPCB Design in Tech presentation says it's around 1:5 for early-stage "design-conscious" startups: http://cl.ly/image/1P1X031p472i
You can view the whole report here: http://www.kpcb.com/blog/design-in-tech-report-2015
Sounds about right. We have 3 designers and 12 developers ..but we really need more developers!
A few of our developers, including me, started in design and have moved onto front-end/fullstack development.
What did Quora say?
I actually didn't find anything for results in the past year. There was one comment regarding the ratio at Github from 2011 thought it safe to assume that ratio was outdated.
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