“You three are nothing like what I see in Silicon Valley,” a visiting employee quips.

I opened my mouth to go into a tirade of how this creative class, the inability for anybody normal to describe what we do, is forgotten in anything. Except for the lone designer who selects the colors.

HBO’s Silicon Valley rarely highlights designers.

They won’t quite understand what I do and what I have observed.

But there’s something interesting about this. But I don’t necessarily feel that it is like the lack of Asian Americans on TV. It’s a misportrayal of a profession. People don’t understand what MBAs do so they get portrayals of characters like Jared, a guy who yells German in his sleep and sacrifices his well-being for the company. And weirder uncomfortable eccentricities.

As a UX professional, I am the one who is investigating the truth about users and organizing communication in a way so that decisions are made from a user-centered perspective. Or better yet, human-centered perspective.

There are designers with big egos. Some who don’t even realize that they have egos. Or people who think that they are designers, but have been surrounded by companies that don’t know any better about great design. Then there are the designers who love what is on the screen, that they are in love with the UI controls, that they are unfettered by what people really need. There is a certain kind of UX professional I am. I would like to think that it’s rare, but there are treasures in our midst.

And when Silicon Valley finally portrays us on the screen, we are probably the ones saying, “So why didn’t you listen to us in the beginning?” *End throwing a deck of wireframes and visual specs in the air*