Are designers faking projects on their portfolios?
When I look at portfolios, I’ve noticed that I never see unglamorous projects. It made me wonder: are people making up projects that they worked on in their current/prior roles? For an easy-to-understand analogy: Sam was a UX designer at Microsoft in the past but is now at Google. He puts on his resume he works on Microsoft Teams. In reality, he works on an admin tool for Teams. He makes up a fake project about some unreleased feature for Teams proper, even though he never did any work on the Teams software itself—probably to impress the people interviewing him at Google. I am not interested in leaving my job anytime soon, but as someone who does the grunt admin/cloud design work, it’s discouraging to see people early in their careers getting to work on the software or apps instead of the less glamorous behind the scenes stuff after 7YOE + Master’s.
Yes they do. Portfolio reviews are so unrealistic because the metrics are so unrealistic these days and contributions are quite divided!
Some of my work is ugly and boring because AWS design library is ugly and some admin dev tools are boring, which is what I do. but I try to focus on UX decisions, design thinking, and iterative approach which resulted in positive user feedback.
If you're interviewing, tell me if you have any real luck getting calls. I work on something similar and struggle with selling my work. Unfortunately, big tech hires half-brained bootcamp "design recruiters" to scout candidates and they're mostly interested in slick visuals, animations, micro-interactions and B2C consumer-based products. No one's interested in internal tooling.
Not sure about the project itself, but I've seen people tailor the structure, details etc. of their projects and even make up numbers to pander to a certain audience. I flag such portfolios down when hiring. And I don't blame the candidate for this. Unfortunately, hiring practices of thd FAANG+ companies have conditioned hiring managers to look for KPIs, business metrics, success stories, impact and visibility, company-wide and beyond. HMs don't seem to care enough about the thought-process, meticulousness of the candidate or challenges faced when shipping the product out. This invariably makes candidates manipulate info. In their work.
I’ve always assumed the numbers were made up. That’s highly sensitive information. Maybe some 200 person company that was bought out wouldn’t come after you, but any large corporation would care.
That’s why when you share KPIs you go for the % difference not the absolute numbers to hide the confidential information.