How much code should a UX Practitioner know?

Hi everyone, I’ve been looking for a UX gig and I’m surprised at how much coding skills employers are wanting. Whilst it’s important to have an understanding of how different technologies work - will the design processes differ much between an interface built with .NET, PHP or Node JS etc? I don’t think so!
Have a look at this job description:

I am currently in the market for a UX Designer for a SAP Centric organisation, for a 12 month contract in Western Sydney. The ideal candidate must have the following:

• Strong experience in an SAP centric environment (SAPUI5 and Fiori)
• Demonstrated experience with modern frameworks/utilities such as Angular, React, OpenUI5, RxJS,Redux, HTML5/REST/ Data Protocols.
• Extensive demonstrated experience working with javascript / CSS including support for multiple browsers such as IE, Firefox, Safari etc.
• Proven experience with large and complex IT projects and environments.
• Demonstrated experience with delivery of innovative technology solutions.
• Advanced verbal communication, documentation & graphical presentation skills, with the ability to communicate complex matters in simple terms.
• Experience in working with outsourced services and IT service providers.

What are your thoughts?

That they are looking for a developer. What surprises me a bit is that it’s clearly a large corporate so I would have thought they’d have had a better understanding of the separation of roles.

Frustrating.

And I agree with you – you shouldn’t need granular knowledge like that if it was truly a UX designer that they are looking for.

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Thanks, yeah - and there’s not a lot mentioned about genuine UX activities, research, A/B testing. I emailed the recruiter letting them know they need to rethink what they’re looking for.

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I will say, though, that knowing how to code can be a particularly useful skill.

A great example of this is a re-design of our site navigation I’m currently working on. We’re moving from a tabbed navigation with static subnav to a more megamenu style approach. As with any navigation piece, we want to tread lightly, but get as much feedback as possible. To that end, I’ve created a jQuery userscript that redesigns the navigation in our QA environment to our vision. Our hope is that by giving out biggest customers some tangible time with the new navigation in a functional but safe environment will help ease their anxiety and generate some great conversations.

To do this required knowledge of userscripts, JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, and CSS-- all of which I’ve picked up working or studying front end development. These skills don’t always come in handy in the UX world, but it’s very nice when they do.

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Sounds cool Doug, thanks for sharing. Yeah, there’s been a few prototypes I’ve created that would have been easier to pull together if I had better knowledge of JS. Ah so much to learn!

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Hey don’t get stuck on how much you don’t know, you just have to know the preliminaries of that stuff. I was stuck (afraid to be exact) at the same point while working on a site translation.pk/ , just start one thing will link to another and in no time you will be having fun.

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