design feels like one of the only creative professions where you can just blatantly not know how to use your tools, to the point of being successful and celebrated for how much ire you cause your coworkers

Counterpoint: Mastery of software like PS, Sketch or Figma in (virtual) product design doesn’t matter, and is myopic, because its output’s just facilitates discussion or document decisions—in high detail—for others (ENG) to build the darn thing from

I don’t organize and name my layers in Figma for the same reasons I don’t organize and name each section on a whiteboard: They’re immaterial stepping stones that output jpegs. (Design system & components is the exception since they’re an end in and of themselves)

A whiteboard is erased when youre done with it. A design file is not. That is not a good analogy.

A whiteboard is erased by necessity, but it doesn’t *have* to be—I’ll bet most orgs have a hundred un-deleted, years old Miro or FigJam boards at this point. And a design file, that’s kept around but unmaintained, is just cruft, and I bet this happens more often than the inverse.

This is a deflection that doesn't make your analogy make more sense or your argument any stronger. The point is that design files are not just vehicles for ideas that are going to be thrown away anyway; they are living, working documents that snapshot an interface in time.

Working documents that someday—be it tomorrow or in 2 years— will be used by someone else as the starting point for their work. It is courteous to make a file that isn't a shitshow of unnamed, unframed layers so that that person can get started quickly and easily.

I don't think that every file needs perfectly named layers—the name is relatively unimportant. But if you don't group things logically, use features like autolayout, or do otherwise make your file sanitary then you're doing a poor job.

The example I was shown by a friend looked pretty much like this. This is unacceptable. If I were a design manager, I would honestly fire this person.

What you’re describing is a messy workshop-problem, not an tool-incompetence problem. Chefs clean their workstation for next morning’s shift, not a potential 2-years-in-the-future-shift, or even a 2 week one. The “design” is the one that ships. Not the one imagined in Figma file

So long as any changes happening between a design file and shipping don’t flow back into the design file, the neatly organized file will always be a historic artifact that’s out of date