I really like this article Michal! We need more people giving practical advice and fewer people contemplating about ideal processes and things that actually never move forward in real life. I’m the first person to say, that after I decided to focus on strategy & research, I was very clear as well on wanting to stay away from Sketch and design. That won’t be my focus and I’ll reject any generalist role because that’s not where I’m focused on right now. But that was 10 years after designing interfaces. Not saying that people need to be designers before becoming researchers but 1) if they’re truly specialised in research, they need to make that transition to design research and they need to understand the context, 2) if we’re talking about the role of UX designer (also known as product designer for in-house or product-focused roles) is still a generalist role and one with its strongest foundations on design. So if someone is going to design a digital product, designing interfaces is going to be part of it! No use of saying “you’re only doing UI” as if that’s a bad thing. Actually only doing UI is a specialisation on its own and I don’t understand when that started to become being seen as a “bad thing” or less than “UX” or how people can even separate UX and UI when we’re referring to digital products. And lastly, research, yes, again, I’m the first one admitting research is complex, way more than I ever imagined it would when I started years ago, and I’m still learning it today. But it’s also true most applied research, the one we do in UX and in agile environments is so not-rigorous and most stuff is never actually put in practice in the real world. So we need to be realistic about things if we actually want to make it better, and there are way many posts about the ideal state of things, and not enough about the reality junior designers will face when getting into their first jobs.