Tech Industry
Yesterday
921
How many hours per week would you work for $1M TC
Tech Industry
Yesterday
1151
I haven’t done shit today!
Tech Industry
2d
43810
Worried that our top performer is an attrition risk. How do managers handle this?
India
Yesterday
294
Heard congress distributing wealth
Tech Industry
Yesterday
3261
Avoid teams with only Chinese or Indians especially with a Chinese/Indian manager
I have been avoiding Design Agencies all my life. But I‘m curious if the urban legends are true. What I have seen and heard: Lots of pressure. Much stress. Not time to do ‚proper job‘. Etc
My own personal experience, as well as what I’ve heard from others that have worked at top tier design agencies is that you’re overworked and underpaid.
Pros: A lot of freedom to explore and leverage the community resources for your personal passions. Get to bring a lot your own quirks to the project work. Get to push and define your craft. Research isn’t necessarily about usability and validation it’s about searching for inspiration. More likely to be going after fuzzy and blue sky design challenges. Often interface directly with key decision makers of large companies including the C-level peeps. Get to work on a wide range of projects in a really short amount of time. Forced to develop soft skills that most designers lack. Cons: Usually do more generative and experimental concept work than you are actually implementing the go-to-market design. Depending on the role, you do work crazy hours. Work/life balance isn’t really a thing Underpaid by a long shot
How do you like it overall? Sometimes I miss doing the fuzzy blue-sky stuff, which I believe can be valuable inasmuch as it influences an organization to think bigger and more imaginatively. But it’s rewarding to build immediately useful stuff that’s more incremental in nature, too.
It can be rewarding. The immediate impact is seeing your clients reactions and growth throughout the project. There’s also a lot of personal enrichment. Because the environment is intense and fast pace you kind of sink or swim. So you learn how to get scrappy, leverage your community both internally and externally and get comfortable with having to learn about a new industry every six weeks. On the flip side you don’t always get exposed to the internal barriers of getting a good design to market. And with the market focus on your experience shipping products that can be detrimental to any young designer using IDEO or a similar agency as a career booster.
How did you land your job there? Experience at other agencies or right out of school?
Can’t speak for IDEO, but had tons of experiences on the agency & consulting side. It’s fun. You deal with more abstract challenges and it can be intellectually stimulating. Lots of room for wanton creativity. People in consulting especially are great; agencies can be annoyingly elitist at times. Ultimately I really prefer working at Amazon. Being around brilliant engineers has been inordinately fulfilling.