Great piece. This is also enlightening to me as a freelance designer/director that has mostly worked in the advertising realm and only flirted with the tech industry. I had thought advertising was the more soul-draining and hopeless arena, but feel a bit more empowered after reading this. In my experience every creative needs to sell their work with a strong rationale for how it fulfills a brief or meets a client/team need. A college design professor once told me: "Design at most companies is 20% skill, and 80% sales." Verbalization and writing composition are every bit important as foundational design.

I thankfully haven't heard "If you want a seat at the table, you need to prove the value of design.", or at least not those exact words. Generally the value of design is that if you don't have it, you don't have an end product or deliverable at all.