IDEO vs FAANG
I personally love IDEO and frog design. Their influence can be seen all over the Bay Area and abroad (design thinking, Stanford D-School, Google Sprints, etc). I just don’t see as much conversation about them as I do about FAANGGGGG. Is it because they are perceived to do more hardware than software? Are they less relevant now, than say 10 years ago? Is caliber of talent same? Is it as prestigious? Thoughts?
Apples and oranges. For IDEO and the like design is the product. For others, design is a part of the larger product. Important but not 100%.
Ideo pays crap
Sometimes I wonder if Design thinking is a propaganda by 3M (who earns the most when post it's, white boards, markers, etc sell). I mean, come on man, didn't people design things before 'design thinking' and 'ideo' ? Since your question is on 'talent' there vs FAANG, I'd say they are very different. People who can sell fiction vs software engineers.
What are you talking about? Product design is incredibly important and the process is equally important. Just because it’s more abstract than you’re used to doesn’t mean it’s a ploy to cheat you out of something... Design thinking just means you’ve considered the whole experience and there are ways to tease out your blind spots through different exercises. I guess I wouldn’t expect a Microsoft engineer to understand why that’s valuable though.
I fully understand the importance of product design, and have a lot of respect for really good design. I am just against this "design thinking" - it is a specific camp that claims to be doing productive work just writing stuff on post its and going for beer at the end of the day. I'm against claiming to do product design with zero context or background on the actual product being designed. "Design thinking" just is "common sense"+lot of post its. Companies have been shipping great product without the post its for many decades now.
Found the IDEO person on blind...
How transferable are the skills/experience if a person were to go from IDEO to google, compared to a person that goes from Apple/FB/Amazon to Google?
Skills/experience are transferable. IDEO and similarly Frog require designers to demonstrate a wider breadth of technical skills while also putting more emphasis on soft skills. The type of problems one might be solving at IDEO or Frog can be quiet different than Apple/FB/Google but as a consultant you are forced to become great problem solvers because every 4 or 6 weeks you could be doing something new, for a client in an industry completely different than the client you previously worked for.