In my experience working with designers, and having done a decent amount of design-y work: yes, definitely.

In my experience, designers tend to be more holistic in their view on things, to a point where they might outright hate it when things are picked apart and defined and categorized. Which is exactly what engineers excel at.

I also find designers to generally be more... emotional, or at least they show their emotional side more, or allow it to express itself.

And then there's the strong value they place on the 'design' of things. The feeling, the cohesion, etc.

One of the best examples of the difference I can think of is when I showed worrydream.com to a designer friend. I was excited about Brett Victor's talks, his views on programming and interfaces and whatnot, and figured my friend would be at least interested in the UX stuff. This friend, however, hated how the site felt bloated and slow and how that in itself was pretty much enough for him to not take this guy's articles seriously. It was an affront, and surely anyone who had anything interesting to say on design and UI would take care of his own site!

Now in many cases the difference between designers and engineers might not be so pronounced. I suppose it's a spectrum. But I notice very clear differences between developers and designers, and it seems to be a common cause of conflict.

I've also noticed this difference within myself. For the past two years I mostly focused on development, after a long time of taking care of more of the whole pipeline (especially client contact and the 'social' aspects of design). I noticed that I started caring markedly less and less about the end result's 'beauty' or logic, and more and more on the internals. I actually stopped noticing things that would've bothered me tremendously in the past: fonts, padding, margins, UX, and so on.

In part, maybe it's also a role you step into (where either role somehow excludes the other).

And the mere fact that I come across very few people who seem to be both excellent designers and engineers supports the idea that there's a difference.

I’m a systems-minded designer who can code. Left/right-brained signifiers work decently well in theory, but fall apart with real humans. People aren’t that binary.

It's pseudoscience. His point isn't, though: some people are more deductive/math oriented, some people are more associative/aesthetically oriented, and some people are neither. It's good for them to mix.

Yup.

I know the whole left/right brain thing isn't real science. I was using it as a common metaphor. Designers and engineers typically approach things differently. Learn from someone else's approach.