The handoff model is broken. Designer produces spec, engineer implements spec, product ships. Everyone did their job. The product still feels off.

The problem is that a lot of UX lives in the gaps — in the loading states, the error messages, the transitions, the edge cases that never made it into Figma. Engineers own those gaps whether they want to or not.

I've started treating UX instinct as a hiring signal. Not "can you design" — but "do you notice when something feels wrong?" Engineers who notice tend to fix it. Engineers who don't tend to ship the spec and move on.

The best products I've worked on had engineers who thought of the interface as part of their job, not a hand-off they were implementing.