How do companies like Duolingo, Notion, Doordash, Lyft, etc fail to fill these open design roles they've had posted for months and months given the amount of talent currently on the market? Why doesn't anyone fire these useless managers? I know the answer - it's because managers are just people who knew they were bad ICs trying to disguise their incompetence and protect fiefdoms. (Yes I'm bitter I've got a kid to feed and these companies keep wasting my time taking me all the way through onsite only to reject for stupid reasons that should have been obvious from call 1) Particular annoyances: Design managers are so disconnected from their craft that they have no idea how to evaluate the applicability of design skills for their needs. Instead they resort to looking for someone who has worked in their exact hyper specific niche in their most recent role (ex: design for b2b onboarding in a mid-sized sales pipeline AI product) because they lack the imagination to break down their actual skills needs. And they end up passing on better designers for ones that are just going to want to jump teams cause they're bored of being typecast. Also see too much emphasis on useless process stuff like workshops, wireframes, etc. Managers don't know how to evaluate actual design (or just actual thought) so they need to see design theatre and buzzwords. If you ask "what is your design process" in an interview you are clueless. What is with this "zero to one" experience fetish? Designing a product (or feature - this term is vague) for the first time is 10x easier than making big improvements to an established product cause releasing anything will always be an improvement over nothing and you have much fewer constraints/debt. And it's not really "zero" for designers when a pm or CEO will usually have most of the idea already anyways. Is this need an admission of a terrible PM function? Looking for "innovative" interaction design. This is just stupid. Designers who design this way make overcomplicated products no one wants to use cause they never actually focus on the "boring" things that would actually make the product better. Both designers and managers have a shockingly bad understanding of the most basic nngroup usability best practices. Common patterns almost always perform better than unique ones except in rare circumstances. So optimizing for an "innovative" designer maximizes your chances of getting a dumb one. Just general weirdly arbitrary things they are looking for that they don't actually prompt or challenge you to talk about. The fact that these are never consistent across managers should be an obvious red flag. Whiteboard exercises aren't remotely representative of real design. If you are checking for absolute basic competence then sure, but if you find yourself analyzing the nuances of whiteboarding performance or if the solution was "too standard" you are clueless. If you think you've had all great managers you are probably wrong and just not a good critical thinker.
Couldn’t agree more on the whole “innovative” design. What does that even mean? Is it novel design? To your point, then it’s just BS; it’s not a legitimate bar for competency. The whole premise should be whether what you’re showing solved the problem of the users, biz, and tech.
innovative design exists. offering unique solutions for unique problems that are also good ux and does not exist (something similar may exist but not the exact one). innovative design is not the problem. the problem is the acknowledgement from superiors who does not know how to evaluate therefore, there's no recognition for innovative designs. Simple design deos not mean easy but managers without a UX background wouldn't know that.
This is why u need to make good personal connections in your career - when the time comes where you need a job you lean on them - managers will always want to hire someone they know and trust - instead of being a hamster in a wheel for people who don’t know you.
Spot on. The design practice is riddled with poor leadership and even poorer methodology.
I feel for ya OP, but hyperbolic statements about the quality of design management comes off as both bitter and a bit naive. I’m not going to get into the specifics (unless you’d like to chat offline) but I’m a hiring manager with 20+ yrs of experience and several of your comments set off red flags like you wouldn’t believe. You need to seriously change your approach if you want to get hired. (I agree whiteboard challenges are in no way representative of real work. I personally don’t do them, and instead rely on a thoughtful walkthrough of your case studies) You’ve had a bad run. That sucks. You can learn from it and adjust, or complain and insist we all don’t know what we’re doing; but then don’t expect the results to change.
Why not get into it in public comments so everyone can benefit? I don't mind. I already said I was bitter. I don't think I'm naive. "I need to change my approach to get hired"? except you know literally nothing about my approach. What in my comment would you expect I'm saying out loud in an interview? And I have been hired many times before and will be again with the general approach I use. But nothing about a desire to complain and a desire tomake adjustments is mutually exclusive.I've seen these problems from the other side of hiring as well so it's not like it's all just based on my experience being the one interviewed. I've been very successful (big user benefit and business impact) and well liked (glowing peer and manager reviews) in every role I've ever had. No one comes away feeling I'm disagreeable or thinking I don't like them even (or especially) when I think they're very very stupid. So seems to me your red flags aren't predictive of anything that matters for being successful in the role. I can certainly believe you are a manager though if your first instinct is to try to quell and diminish valid criticisms instead of reflecting on how they can be taken into account and acted on.
Because I don’t feel like the flame war you’re apparently itching for. I offered to help, you chose not to take it. Best of luck in your search.
Agree but this is no different from any job out there today. It's all about theatrics and buzzwords. No manager is going to hire based on imagination. The only thing they want to hear is you have done it before at a competitor. Best if you can do innovative work and deliver zero to one impact that makes them LOOK GOOD hiring you. That's all that matters for managers in any profession.
I think you are pretty much right but I do think there are some few managers who do "get it". Mostly the ones who have intrinsic care for the work and doing the right thing over just protecting their own career. Who step into management despite being strong ICs because they see no one else is doing a good job. But definitely not common.
It’s the market. Hiring managers can be picky, and there isn’t anything we can do about it. In early/mid 2022, anyone who had a pulse could get a design job. But now it’s easier for them to find those people with niche experience. I don’t really agree with most of your post, but I get the spirit of it. Hiring does definitely feel broken. I was interviewing at an established start up and the hiring manager asked me for experience “designing innovative and new experiences,” and I guess I didn’t answer the question to his liking. I then asked him if he had an example he could tell me, and he pulled up Figma to show me the work: it was basically an audio feature that Headspace had already created. Like come on. Y’all make clocks. You’re not making flying cars.
Agreed.
Design is becoming a good ole boys club and it’s very unfortunate. Middle management is kind of useless. Sorry not sorry. Managers have one purpose in my mind, and that is to give me a promotion - otherwise I’m moving on.
What middle management though? They (we) have been mostly getting blasted by layoffs and restructurings too...
Hi there. Offering an alternate perspective, as a hiring manager myself and knowing hiring managers personally at all of those places you listed. In today’s market, there’s no rush to fill an open role as it was during the boom in 2021. The bar for talent is higher, the market is more saturated, so companies are willing to wait longer to find the right fit.
I agree with your explanation, but not with it being a justification. Many companies, even medium to large ones are managing to still fill roles quickly or at least in reasonable timelines. The companies listed are particularly bad exceptions and shouldn't be looked at as the norm. No matter the market there is a HUGE opportunity cost to taking 6+ months to fill a role that will dwarf arbitrary, unmeasurable, and unfalsifiable specifications for exact "fit", especially when that fit isn't actually related to skills but just the type of company they're coming from. And when you are bringing in so many people to interview who don't hit that fit you are wasting massive amounts of time for the people on both sides of the interview. You have to ask what is wrong with your screening process that you're moving so many people into the onsite without there being a real chance of them getting the role.
The UX Research leadership is equally bad. Most managers don’t even have research backgrounds…
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Spot on! Was rejected by doordash after portfolio round. Everything went well but a rejection was surprise. I think they just wanted to hire from competing product and not from any other field. Dunno why they wasted my time.
In 2023, 90% of the recruiters reaching out to me are people who are competitors or adjacently-related to my current role. It’s annoying because I don’t want to work in this particular industry anymore and no one else seems to be biting 🥲