Once again, the topic of designers learning how to code has come up. It doesn’t matter what the reason is this time. It is the same message I’ve heard so many times before. Put simply, I think this discourse has run its course.

I’ve been at this a while. I’ve been designing and making art for 20 years. And in that time, people around me have told me a bunch of things that I “should” or “shouldn’t” do that I determined were not in my interest, but rather in theirs.

In college, I was told by a professor not to accentuate the silhouette of objects in my drawings too much. She said I should instead focus on the form. And while that may be good advice if my intention is to draw forms, what if my intention is to draw shapes?

That year, I quit college to pursue my career as a designer. In the last 10 years, I’ve drawn shapes for Nike, Instagram, Messenger, Twitter, Dailymotion, Patreon, and Notion.

In some of my earliest years as a designer, people told me that illustration was going away, and that I should start learning 3D. I put in a small amount of effort before realizing it was not enjoyable for me. I preferred drawing shapes, and wrangling 3D models was simply not fun.

But I kept getting illustration jobs. I’ve made over a hundred app icons—more if you count alternates and variations—and I don’t think any of them use 3D models. On occasion, I’ll use a rudimentary 3D model of a basic shape as a guide, but it rarely goes much farther than that.

So many times over the years, people have told designers—including myself—that we should learn to code. And over the span of the 20 years I’ve been using my computer to draw things, I have sometimes tinkered with code. I have written HTML and CSS, sure, but I’ve also poked around Xcode and made small modifications to codebases I’ve belonged to.

But I don’t think this capability is particularly valuable in terms of understanding limitations of the medium. How do I know? Incredible engineers who have worked for 40 years run into walls that they couldn’t have predicted. My casual learning how to code is not going to give me much insight to reduce the amount of conversations I have with engineers. As it turns out, sometimes we just have to work things out by working together.

Over time, everyone’s intuition will improve. Designers don’t have to learn how to code to understand how to work with engineers any more than engineers have to learn how to design to work with designers. And though I hear designers should learn to code so often, I almost never hear that engineers should learn to design.

If there’s one thing I’ve personally learned in my career, it’s this: do what you want to do. It’s your life. It’s your work. It’s your life’s work. Do what satisfies your brain, and if it makes you money, great.

If you want to learn how to code, do it. But don’t do it because someone else told you so. Do it because you think it’s worth your time. Do it because you’re curious. Do it because you want to.

I’m not bothered if an engineer asks me how I want to do something. I’d actually prefer it to the alternative, where an engineer thinks their surface-level knowledge of design is sufficient. I live it. I breathe it. They don’t. That’s fine.

Both parties can understand the other’s limitations without learning how to do it themselves. And—in my opinion—you can more easily push the limitations without learning it.

Engineers love to tell me the things I want to do are impossible or difficult to implement. And if I took them at their word, we’d not even try. But because I don’t think it’s impossible, then we get to work it out together. Often, it’s not a technical limitation that stood in our way, but rather a misunderstood assumption. Learning to code doesn’t make this easier. But talking it out often does.

If you choose to gain additional perspective by learning it on your own, go for it. My advice is only to do what you want to do and not let others tell you what you should and shouldn’t do. You know you best.

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