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

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.

Which leads back to the thought about being understaffed. In many situations, people don't have the luxury of scrutinizing craft because you only have 1–2 designers and hiring more is either very difficult or not an option.

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and shipping don’t flow back into the design file, the neatly organized file will always be a historic artifact that’s out of date

Sure, if you are permanently working in a silo by yourself. However, most people work on teams with other designers. If this is you and you don't build usable files, youre slowing down the person that works on that file after you and wasting their time.

I get this sentiment 100%, and where a design file is its own end, I agree, but I don’t buy the framing of “permanently working in a silo by yourself”—90% of the time, a Figma file of “a final design” is functionally just a prototype

Again, it is a snapshot of an interface in time. At that moment is a prototype, but in the future it is a reference point to be built upon for the next snapshot.