Reading this made me wonder if the author really has a good understanding of what's going on in the UX field. Maybe he's run into a few people calling themselves UX designers and then generalizing from a small sample into the entire field? I don't know. Here's some things that I wish everyone understood:

1. UX designers aren't solely in charge of the user experience - Yes, UX designers have been saying that from day one. UX is about breaking down organizational barriers and facilitating collaboration across disciplines. That's fundamental to the concept, because looking at a product from a user's perspective, you don't see organizational divisions, internal politics, fiefdoms dominated by specific disciplines and so on. Users experience a product in a holistic way, but organizations are fragmented into specializations. Poor UX is often the result of organizations optimizing for the efficiency of division of labor without understanding the tradeoff for the end user. That's a fundamental mismatch that UX tries to remedy.

2. UX designers didn't take ownership away from anyone. When the discipline was first emerging, very few people cared. Over the last 15 years, the trend has been UX designers saying things like "How do I get my developers to care about the user's experience?" Now UX is starting to become strategically important, and (some, not all) developers realize that they're getting left behind. That's not UX designers doing it to you, that's a self-inflicted wound. I started as a developer 10 years ago, but quickly realized that UX was the future, and made the switch. UX designers have been banging the drum for 15 years trying to get everyone working together. A lot of developers are only now starting to wake up and realize they need to be involved, but find themselves at a 10-15 year disadvantage. Others stepped up and took ownership over something that no one else cared about and today they have experience, knowledge, skills and a track record in a strategically important area. Sorry about that. We tried to tell you.

3. Elliot comes off pretty naive when he talks about iteration. That's a pretty new idea in software, which has historically been dominated by a requirements-oriented traditional engineering mindset. As a result, some developers talk about iteration like they invented it, but other product design disciplines - architecture, graphic design, film, fashion, industrial design - have been doing iteration for many decades, probably even centuries. You know how designers talk about mockups? Here's the wikipedia definition of a mockup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockup

> "In manufacturing and design, a mockup, or mock-up, is a scale or full-size model of a design or device, used for teaching, demonstration, design evaluation, promotion, and other purposes. A mockup is a prototype if it provides at least part of the functionality of a system and enables testing of a design. Mock-ups are used by designers mainly to acquire feedback from users."

4. There are still many large barriers to developers participating in the UX process, but the important ones aren't about job titles. Here are some things developers need to deal with when getting involved in UX:

- Lack of career incentives - when you interview for your next job, are you going to be asked any questions about the UX of what you worked on? Is your performance at your current job evaluated in terms of your impact on UX? Do you hold yourself personally accountable for poor UX? If not, then like the chicken and pig fable, you're involved but not committed. It's one thing to say that everyone is responsible for a good UX. It's another to actually hold people (or yourself) responsible.

- Lack of empathy - you're building a product for someone else to use. If you privilege your own preferences and way of working, if you lack the flexibility to adopt the mindset of someone who is very different from you, you won't succeed in UX. You're probably very smart. Don't let that get in the way of empathizing with people who you think are beneath you.

- Lack of skills - you don't need visual design skills to contribute to UX. At a strategic level, UX is about understanding people: what they need and want, what motivates them, what's important to them. The best UX designers are insightful observers of human nature.

- Over-specialization - for some people, their whole lives revolve around their job. Good UX designers are relentlessly curious about a wide range of topics and activities. They don't accept artificial divisions of labor at work, and definitely don't let them carry over into their personal lives. Remember the saying: nothing human is alien to me.