When I wrote my article, “Still can’t get a UX job? Give up”, it was unsurprisingly met with a lot of controversy. I get asked why I always seem so negative with my views, and why I seemingly won’t stop discouraging people from joining the industry.

Look, guys. My perspectives aren’t anything new — Senior level professionals have been trying to address the untold truths that are self-evident in the design industry. It is not done as an act of discouragement to the potential new joiners in the industry, but rather as a written record of the overall challenges and hurdles designers of a particular generation have faced.

It might seem like I’m overall just very negative about the industry and its developments — But I am literally just recording what’s happening through this medium. If it’s provocative, good, because that’s the whole point of why I invest my time writing anything about the industry.

These journals written by me and other design writers serves as a reference for design students in the present and for the future. So you can try and stop us, but we’ll keep writing, thank you.

Choosing to be in UX has ultimately worked in my favour career-wise, and yet I’ve found it really difficult to recommend that same path to my juniors or other transitioning professionals.

It’s not that I don’t want others to be as successful as me. I desire growth and victories for everyone else, and it’s precisely because of my awareness that I have become weary of the advice I give others.

I count myself an advocate for honesty and truth about the design industry. I’m not here to gloat about how amazing it is to be thriving in a hot career path, I’m just here to lay out the facts that will guide you to success if you interpret them right. And that includes both the pros and the cons about the UX space.

I cannot, in good conscience, not bitch about the industry. Because that’s just laying a honey-trap for people, and I don’t endorse being a snake like that.

Why I don’t recommend UX anymore as a career starter and pivot

UX is a flourishing industry that many professionals, design or non-design, are attracted to because it pays the best in ratio to the effort you need to put in to get a tech job, and in ratio of the difficulty it takes to get mastery in the design and arts space vs the engineering space.

Basically, it’s easy enough and pays very well compared to a lot of other tech positions and design jobs out there. Screw learning code, screw training craftsmanship in design — We just have to learn and follow 5 steps and we can make a career out of it.

Long-term professionals in the industry would have smiled at that, because they know I jest. UX Design isn’t as easy as following steps 1 to 5, and it is getting less worthwhile now for people looking to make a quick buck.

As a industry practitioner, I see that as a good thing. As an industry mentor, oh boy, this really sucks.

Unhealthy competition exists today

Design has always been a cut-throat industry. And it’s even more so now that there’s been a huge shift of non-design trained professionals looking to enter the industry for the above reasons I mentioned.

Some of you might think, “The competition is nothing! Once I get a job, I’m set for a while.”

Hm, I tend to disagree with that line of naivety.

You see, when I started my career, I had literally no competition anywhere (I also had little choices in terms of where I worked, but that’s another story).

Lack of competition = Ease of employment. This is exactly what helped me get a ton of UX jobs full-time and freelance. This is also what enabled me to jump from one job to another without care, rapidly raising my salary in the process.

When there is more competition, not only is getting that first job difficult for you, hopping around companies for more experience and salary will also be an extremely labourious task.

Translation: You might not grow as fast in the UX industry today because of the competition you’ll have to constantly face in today’s environment. UX is no longer an industry that gives you easy chances to succeed.

The amount of competition, along with other negatives observed in the space, has created what I consider one of the worst career starting scenarios for juniors.

As a senior, this scenario is a great stress test for my career; we can have fun with this. But for juniors, this is nothing more than a harmful environment that will have long-term negative impact on your careers.

You won’t get an easy start and stable growth, and that means only the privileged prevail.

Stagnation is a card that will always come to your hand

It’s okay to not grow as fast as the top designers in the field or hustle as hard as the best freelancers in UX today; but stagnation is not easily forgiven, and it’s also a constant reality forced upon practitioners today.

There are multiple paths to growth as a designer, but the opportunity to design and develop something by yourself, instead of taking over legacy work from others, is something that will accelerate that growth and increase your credibility massively.

And guess what? You’re very unlikely to work on stuff like that anymore.

There are multiple core skills a designer needs; learning how to design and ship from scratch is one of those cores. With the amount of competition in the industry, plus the need for job security in this economy, there’s not much jobs availabe out there that allows you to practice this particular core skill.

Hence, your growth as a designer will be slacked if you’re not careful. Stagnation is one of the most dangerous killers of design careers.

While there are ways to practice design and avoid being complacent in this field, there is only so much you can do by practicing design yourself. As mentioned in my article, “Employable designers ship products”, a successful design practice needs exclusivity.

If you only get opportunities to work on common software and applications that thousands of other designers have also designed, you will stagnate professionally even if you work hard over the weekends to better your technical skills.

There are two ways a design professional most commonly stagnate: technically or professionally.

Technical stagnation can be fixed easily by learning skills and spending time to familiarise yourself with design methods and best practices.

Professional stagnation is a much taller hurdle to jump. If you get stuck too long in the same position, at the same company, or just catch yourself doing the same job scope at every position you’ve been in, you’re pretty much screwing yourself over.

This is the reason why some seniors and veterans, despite their “trove of knowledge” and “technical mastery”, struggle to find work today*. If you are professionally stagnant in any way, regardless by your choice or not, you will be seen as inferior and be cast out.

*I wrote about this in detail here: “Senior and veteran UX designers suck”. It’s super snarky but a valid, and highly recommended read.

Compromising is the norm in our workflow

Some mornings, I wake up missing the days where waterfall was the primary method to build products.

While agile makes our work more fragmented and a lot easier to digest, it also significantly compromises the design quality we deliver in the short-term.

Compromising on your designs is a common occurrence at this point. Nothing delivered will be perfect and well-thought out. Designers are constantly chased by sprint deadlines, and our results and impact depends on the condensed cluster of items we shipped, rather than a single, intentional series of decisions.

We are basically forced to spend time on compromises in our design solutions due to technical or business dependencies. That’s the reality our job, to serve other departments and be compromised in the process.

It certainly doesn’t feel good to know that you can’t be one of the OG designers in MAANGs or other Big Tech companies that didn’t (and still do not) design* their successful products with agile processes. But our feelings do not matter, the work we ship does.

*Keyword here is design. They might build with agile, but I am 100% sure they do not design with agile.

If you’re bad at compromising, well, this job ain’t for you.

If you’re not a creative, you will struggle

Vague briefs and discoveries can be fun for creatives, but it’s rarely so for those who like instruction and clear solutions. The biggest misfit I have found among transitioning professionals is a personality and job scope mismatch.

UX design, at the end of the day, is still a creative job despite our very technical processes. As a designer, you will be expected to navigate ambiguity and grey areas in product requirements on the daily. You are expected to create solutions that may not have existed before.

I find it humorous that some people think our jobs are easy, and come into the industry with completely wrong expectations: Wait for the requirements from your PM or PO, digitise the wireframes and userflows they have already sketched out, get approvals and boom! You got yourself a solution.

All low-impact projects will be like this, but it is definitely not the reality for places that deliver high-quality design. If you’re not prepared to handle creative environments where you’re left to figure stuff out on your own, you will struggle and be burned out really quickly.

Poke your heart and ask yourself if you are creative or would like to become one. If you’re thinking ‘no’ for both, then this industry really wouldn’t be a fit for you no matter how hard you try to force it.

Other design industries are having a shortage

To those thinking of a design career shift but not knowing where to go yet, here’s your opportunity to take risks.

My stint in UX started when I noticed there was a shortage of UX designers in my country. Contrary to popular belief, I didn’t enter this profession out of passion.

I did it after freelancing design, analysing all the design disciplines I can perform, and coming to a conclusion that UX will be picked up quickly in my region because there was a huge need for it but not enough talent. I went against the trend of becoming an industrial designer or a marketing designer or a motion artist (which was all in the rage and aligns with my passions back then).

You guys already know not following the herd like a lemming worked out for me. So my advice is: Always go against the tide to gain more market share. If you want to be unique and sought after today, UX isn’t it.

Career planning is a lot like financial investments, you want to be the first people to catch onto something. If other people caught on first, you’re not going to profit as much because you’re late in the game.

With this shift, there is an abundance of UX designers trying to get a small piece of the big game. But there are plenty of other design disciplines that are currently bleeding hard and are desperately needing talents to fill the gap.

This is the perfect time to use the situation to your leverage. Go on uncharted territory and who knows? Maybe you’ll be rewarded.

Oversupply will lead to lower salaries

Plausibly an unpopular opinion, but my take on our salaries in UX is that it will start to dip with the oversupply of designers in the space (on top of our declining impact, but I’m not going to talk about this now).

This industry will balance itself out like how the software engineering industry did.

Lack of supply equals to high salaries, oversupply equals to reduced starting salaries (which might lead to reduced base salaries across all titles), and long-time oversupply basically leads to benchmarked salaries.

Every single one of us is a data point for HR and talent acquisition right now. So mark my words, UX will not be as well-paid soon for those not pulling their weight in their companies.

The oversupply also means that we are easily replaceable, and you can’t use “UX is important and I am one of the few experts in the field” anymore as a leverage for better salaries. Your companies can literally hire someone else slightly junior or someone with a lower salary expectation to save costs, and get the same quality of work.

And believe me, many companies are trying to save costs like crazy now. You have lesser leverage now even if you have the expertise.

Your experience won’t mean much when all the juniors today can catch up with you in a few years. If you want a better bargaining chip, you have to prepare to really earn it.

Is all hope lost?

Obviously not! You can still be very successful coming into UX now, but that is fully dependent on your circumstance. For a majority of aspirants, you won’t make it that far and that is the reality of the current situation.

With the amount of layoffs that is happening in tech right now, you’re not just competing with juniors graduating from fast-track bootcamps, you’re also competing with mid-levels and seniors in the space for a rice bowl.

I do not envy anyone job hunting in the UX industry at this moment.

Here’s my best advice: Weigh your risks, set a end date of how much time and money you are willing to sacrifice for this career, and if you reached that stop-lost, just kill the idea and try something else.

If I restarted my career today from scratch, I wouldn’t be looking at UX design to start. And that is my honest opinion.

Closing thoughts

A lot of UX aspirants are looking at this industry as their financial saviour from whatever less-than-ideal circumstance they are currently in.

I’ve constantly expressed my concerns joining any industry with monetary goals at the center of your objectives, because it is something that will backfire when the market conditions for the said industry changes to work against you. This isn’t something you can control, though you can observe them as they happen.

At the end of the day, you can choose to do whatever you want. But realistic planning and career strategy customised for yourself would work better than trying to mimic the success of others.

If money is what you want, there are honestly easier and less roundabout ways to get a job that pays better. UX is not the answer.

If a career is what you want, you’ll need to be prepared to work doubly hard to get it. Again, UX might not be the best path for you depending on what your end goal is.

Stop following trends and start making wiser decisions. Unlike what most people say, UX is not easy and it isn’t all rainbows and ponies and making a career out of passion.

UX design is not going to save your career, or fill the gap in your unfulfilling existence as a salary worker. So please, don’t bet your life on it.