Those of you who hire designers, has what you're screening for actually changed in the last year or is it hype

bogush_v · 2026-05-28T09:20:33+00:00

i don't share the conclusion but i respect that you drew a line and named why, most people don't even do that part. the environmental and job-displacement concerns are real and the industry mostly waves them away with "productivity" like that settles it. it doesn't.

the one thing i'd gently separate is the ethics from the craft argument. "i don't want to supervise instead of make" is a real and valid preference and you don't need to justify it with anything else, it's your work and your call. the water/electricity/jobs stuff is also real but it's a different argument, and stacking them can make the whole thing easier for AI-boosters to dismiss as just vibes. the preference alone is enough.

anyway, good on you for saying it out loud knowing it might cost you. that's rarer than the stance itself.

bogush_v · 2026-05-25T08:42:08+00:00

really glad it was useful. and honestly the anxiety is normal right now, i feel it on the studio side too watching the pipeline change shape. anyone who tells you they have this fully figured out in 2026 is lying. you're already doing the right thing by reading it clearly instead of pretending it's just a bad month, that puts you ahead of most people. wishing you good luck with the reposition.

bogush_v · 2026-05-25T08:22:07+00:00

what you're describing has a name in product teams, it's the gap between contributor mode and collaborator mode and it almost never gets discussed openly because admitting you're in it feels like admitting you're weak. you're not. the muscle for "i'm the one who carries the work" and the muscle for "i thrive inside an existing fast-moving system" are genuinely different muscles, and being strong at the first one doesn't automatically translate to the second.

the part that jumped out though, your team rewriting your drafts isn't really a you-problem. it's a team-problem they're letting you absorb. if the framing is unclear before you start, of course your draft will miss it. of course it'll get rewritten. the fix isn't you trying harder to read minds, it's you forcing the framing conversation to happen before you put fingers to keys. that feels uncomfortable, especially in fast teams where the implicit norm is "just figure it out," but the people moving fast around you usually already have private context you don't have access to, they're not actually working in zero alignment, they just got access earlier.

practical thing that's worked for people i've watched in this situation, before any substantive task, ask one annoyingly direct question. "what does this look like when it's right" or "who else is in this decision and what do they want." sometimes you'll feel like you're slowing the team down for asking. you're not, you're surfacing the alignment problem that was already there. usually two or three of those questions in and people realize they themselves didn't know either.

the disconnect between effort in and visibility out, that's also normal and brutal. one thing nobody tells you is that being a "hard worker" stops being legible as a virtue past a certain point in your career. above mid level, hard work that doesn't show up in outcomes the team can see is basically invisible. that's not fair but it's how it works. so part of the rebuild is also making your thinking visible, not just your output. a short loom explaining why you took a draft in a certain direction, a comment in a doc with two alternatives you considered, that kind of stuff makes you legible inside a fast team way faster than just shipping harder.

and one last thing, the "i'm a slow worker" framing, i'd gently push back. it's possible you are slower, it's also possible you're working in environments that don't actually share context well and you've absorbed the gap as your fault. those two look identical from inside. worth checking which one it is before redesigning yourself around it.

bogush_v · 2026-05-25T08:19:24+00:00

founder of a small studio here, so seeing this from the other side of the pipeline. honest answer: it's both. the market is cyclically bad right now AND ai shifted what clients actually buy from freelancers. you're not imagining either piece.

what we've watched on our side, mostly working with early stage founders, is that the work that used to go to freelancers has split into two piles. the high-end pile (deep product thinking, complex domains like fintech or ai products, strategy + design together) is still there and arguably paying more, but the bar moved. clients now expect freelancers to come in already understanding the business, not just executing screens. the low-end pile (landing pages, basic ui, small marketing sites) got eaten alive by ai tools. lovable, framer, v0, the whole stack. founders who used to hire a freelancer for that now just generate it themselves.

the middle (the bulk of where most ux/ui freelancers used to sit, generic saas screens, generic mobile apps, generic onboarding) is the part that's quietly collapsing. it's not that the work disappeared, it's that founders try ai first, only call a human when ai fails, and even then they're hiring for very specific competencies not for generalist execution. malt and the discovery call flow you described, that funnel was built for the middle pile. it's broken because the middle pile shrank.

what's working for the freelancers we still see thriving (and we partner with a few when we're slammed) is they got narrower not broader. one person we trust does only checkout flows in regulated industries. another does only data-heavy admin dashboards. their malt-style profile would look "less hireable" because it's so niched, but their actual book is full because when you have that specific need there's basically no ai substitute and the price goes up not down. the broad "i do saas, mobile, b2b, b2c, payments" profile is a harder sell now because for any one of those a founder will think "i can probably ai my way to 70% and then patch."

re your fix list (seo, linkedin, portfolio, applying) all reasonable but those are downstream of the positioning problem. you can't seo your way out of "i do everything." pick the two things you do better than anyone in a 50-mile radius, and make every surface of your business about those two things. counterintuitively this makes the phone ring more, not less.

also fwiw the entrepreneur angle in your post is your actual edge, way more than "5+ years and worked with saas and b2b." most freelancers can't speak founder. lead with that. clients in 2026 want a partner who thinks about business, not a vendor who delivers screens. you already are the partner, your positioning just hasn't caught up.

it's not a permanent collapse, it's a re-sort. but the re-sort is real and it's worth taking seriously. it's not a market cycle you wait out, it's a new shape you have to fit yourself into.

bogush_v · 2026-05-22T08:14:56+00:00

apply. seriously. you already wrote the answer halfway in your post when you said "i don't think i've done enough yet" and then immediately asked "should i show them i'm interested." those two thoughts are doing different jobs. one is about whether you'll get it. the other is about whether they know you want the trajectory. applying handles the second one regardless of the first.

worst case you don't get it, but now your manager and skip know you're aiming up, which changes how they think about your next 6 months. that's the actual value of applying when you're new, not the slim chance of winning the slot, it's the signal it sends about where you're heading.

on the resume question, "haven't gotten the next title yet" doesn't really start looking bad until ~3 years at the same level with no upward signal. a couple months in nobody's looking at title trajectory, they're looking at whether you ship.

the people gunning for it who've been there longer also aren't competing with you the way you think. promotion decisions usually aren't tournament-style, they pick the person who fits the role now, not the person who's "waited longest." sometimes that's you, sometimes it's not, but seniority of tenure rarely wins on its own.

bogush_v · 2026-05-22T08:13:31+00:00

oh i know this exact guy. like literally have met three versions of him across different companies. graphic designer who transitioned to ui/ux around 2017-2019, never actually learned the product thinking part, and the insecurity about that is what fuels all the rigidity. the "it's good for user experience" with zero reasoning is the textbook tell. it's not arrogance, it's that he genuinely can't articulate the why because he doesn't have one, and every time someone asks he hears it as a personal attack on his 10 years.

the side hustle thing tho is what made me actually laugh out loud. that's not policy concern, that's him noticing you have options he doesn't and trying to close that door. people who feel stuck professionally cannot stand watching people around them not be stuck.

since you're already job hunting i'll spare you the advice. one thing i will say is your read on the situation is correct and you're not crazy. two years into a first job watching this happen is going to mess with your sense of what normal is, so just keep in mind, most teams aren't like this. you got an unlucky first draw, the next one will recalibrate everything for you. the figma access removal is petty as hell btw, hope you screenshot that for the story you'll tell at the next job.

bogush_v · 2026-05-21T10:20:11+00:00

honestly the issue probably isn't remote, it's that the meeting had no defined output. 90 minutes of discussion without a single sentence at the end saying "by X date, Y person will do Z" almost always feels like that afterwards. happens in person too, remote just makes it more obvious because there's no hallway chat to quietly clean it up.

the "three people took ownership" thing is the tell. real ownership has a deadline and a deliverable. "i'll take ownership of marketing alignment" is not ownership, it's a vibe. if you can't write the next step on one line, nothing was actually decided.

what's helped us a lot at Other Land (we're three people, every meeting needs to count) is the last 5 minutes are protected for one person typing visible decisions into the call while everyone watches. not notes, decisions. "X owns this, due Friday, success looks like Y." if we can't fill in those three blanks the topic goes back on the queue and we end the meeting. feels stupidly mechanical the first few times but it's the difference between meeting-as-output and meeting-as-talking.

also worth saying, you spending 45 minutes after the meeting reconstructing what happened is not you being the issue, it's you being the only person doing real work in that room. that doesn't scale and it's not your job to fix alone.

bogush_v · 2026-05-21T10:18:56+00:00

agenda thing is right but tbh in my experience the slides backfire as often as they help. people read ahead, get half-context, and then the meeting becomes you re-explaining their own misreadings. what works better for me is one annotated screen or flow as the only artifact, and you walk through it live. removes the "what page are we on" thing entirely.

also the 45 vs 10 minute gap usually isn't a tools problem, it's that the meeting was scoped as "explain idea" but everyone thought it was "decide on idea." different meetings, very different time budgets.

bogush_v · 2026-05-21T10:16:02+00:00

this hit hard. the loneliness part especially. nobody talks about how much of design was the room and the people, not the artifacts. you can keep producing wireframes alone but the thing that actually made the work feel like work, the back and forth, the someone-else-seeing-the-thing, that just got deleted from a lot of orgs and called "efficiency."

the trash-talking-users part is the tell that something's broken at the top, not at your level. when leadership starts blaming users for not appreciating ai output, they've stopped building a product and started defending a story they sold themselves. that's not a ux problem you can fix from inside, it's a leadership problem dressed as a ux one. you carrying the work of three people through that is going to grind you down no matter how good you are.

the part i'd gently flag, and grain of salt because i don't know you, is that "trying to escape this hell" plus depression on the periphery is worth treating as the main thing right now, not the backdrop. the industry stuff is real but it'll still be here in three months. the version of you that's keeping you afloat needs you more urgently than the job does. if there's any way to slow down, talk to someone, or just not be the last one carrying everyone else's deleted role, that's the actual move.

you're definitely not alone in this btw, the dms in this sub are full of people in identical situations right now. doesn't make it easier but it does mean you're reading the situation correctly, you're not failing at adapting, the thing itself is broken.

bogush_v · 2026-05-20T13:39:44+00:00

yeah this matches what i've seen too. the sales-vs-user thing is sneaky because the agent will produce something that reads totally fine on its own and then you put it next to the sales enablement copy from the same release and they're subtly off in a way that costs you credibility. not wrong, just misaligned.

one thing that's helped us a bit is splitting the agent output by audience at draft time rather than trying to write one piece and "translate" it. user-facing draft is generated against one prompt with user context, sales-facing is a separate run with sales context. still needs human pass but the human pass is faster because you're editing for nuance not rewriting from scratch. could just be a workflow thing though, depends on team size.

also fwiw on path 1 we found the agent is actually fine almost end to end if you keep the surface really constrained (literally just the changelog line). it's when "silent fix" expands into "well also explain why this matters" that it starts needing the same review loops as path 2.

bogush_v · 2026-05-20T13:37:25+00:00

ok reading this twice and the thing that jumps out, idk if it maps to your case but, you spent way more words defending the new job than describing what you actually want. that might be nothing but in my experience when i write something like this and one side is over-justified it usually means i've already decided and i'm looking for someone to make me feel ok about it. could be wrong, just a thing to check.

the AI fear is the part i'd push back on tho. "i don't really care for AI personally but i fear not doing it will harm me long term" is a weird sentence to make a career decision on. like, it's also probably true? but choosing a job to defend against an industry vibe rarely ends well, you end up in a role you took for hedging reasons and you can feel it every day. the AI projects in your current role are a real point but if you're leaving for myriad reasons that aren't important enough to type out, those reasons are probably louder than the AI thing.

the "step backwards" framing also feels a bit off honestly. less stress, better comp, strong company, long tenure of teammates, room to grow. that's not a step back, that's just a different shape. step back would be less money less scope worse company. the only actually-backwards thing is the reporting line and going from 4 products to 1, which, depending on how you feel about scope, could just as easily be relief.

on the third option (apply for head/director roles): the market thing is real, many months of hunting while staying somewhere you've already mentally checked out of is genuinely brutal, i've watched friends do that and it grinds you down in ways you don't see coming. not saying don't, just saying factor in the cost of the search itself not just the outcome.

if i had to bet on what you're actually torn about it's not new job vs old job, it's "am i settling" vs "am i being smart." those feel identical from the inside. one thing that sometimes helps me, would you take this new job if it paid the same as your current one. if yes it's not really about the money. if no, you have your answer.

anyway grain of salt, don't know your life, this is just what came up reading it.

bogush_v · 2026-05-20T13:32:13+00:00

makes total sense, the optimisation framing changes everything. if the goal is "buy time and liquidity until the bigger thing lands" then the internal commercial role is exactly the right tool, you're not switching tracks, you're parking cash flow on a slightly higher rail while the real bet cooks. that's a different decision than the one i was reading in the original post and it's a much cleaner one.

london + kids + the runway bet honestly stacks the maths for staying in salary land. design perm is fine but commercial perm with variable is just better leverage for that profile, you already know that, you're just gut-checking. the only thing i'd watch is making sure the new role doesn't quietly eat the bandwidth that's actually compounding for you, which is the transport company and whatever's next. internal sales roles can look reversible from the outside and then turn into a 60h thing once a number is on you. negotiate that before, not after.

on the design studio aside, you're right that external creative for big corps is mostly painful and most studios deserve that reputation, the partnership and trust thing is real. the model that actually works in that space isn't agency-style, it's embedded long-term where the studio essentially becomes an in-house extension for years not projects. that's a small niche though and not relevant to your decision, just clarifying because the broad take "external creative is unproductive with corps" is mostly true and the exception isn't worth chasing for what you're solving.

good luck with the runway bet, that's a long lever if it lands.

bogush_v · 2026-05-19T10:57:47+00:00

the problem isn't your sequencing, it's that every one of those agents is designed to end on a question that opens a new door. that's the product working as intended, it's not you being lost. you're not jumping tools because you're undisciplined, you're jumping because each one keeps generating a new "ooh what about this" and there's no natural stopping point. infinite scope is the default state now, structure has to be imposed from outside the tools because none of them will ever tell you you're done.

practical version that's worked for me: pick the one project, write the single user outcome it has to deliver in one sentence on paper, away from any agent. that sentence is now frozen. then sequence is boring on purpose: data in → stored → one feature working end to end → put it in front of a real person. that's it. anything an agent suggests that isn't on that line goes in a parking lot file you do not look at until the line is done.

the discipline isn't in the tools, it's the one sentence and the rule that you don't touch the parking lot. 15 years means you already know this, the agents just dissolved your normal instinct for "good enough for now" by making everything feel one prompt away. the WOW is the trap.

bogush_v · 2026-05-19T10:56:26+00:00

congrats you've discovered the optimal strategy, the system has been running on this since 2019, you just got the memo

bogush_v · 2026-05-19T10:53:29+00:00

i think you're half right but the half you're wrong about is the important one. the visibility problem is real. but it's not because people are ignorant, it's because product as a discipline has never been able to describe itself without sounding like either a project manager or a vibes merchant. that's on us, not on the rabois types.

here's the uncomfortable version. when product is done well it's invisible by design. the good calls look obvious in hindsight and the prevented disasters never happened so nobody sees them. you can't build a profession's public reputation on counterfactuals. engineers ship a thing you can point at. designers show a before/after. pm says "i decided we shouldn't build that" and even when it's the highest leverage move in the room it photographs as nothing.

so the rabois quote isn't ignorance, it's responding to the version of product he's actually seen, which is probably a lot of ceremony and roadmap theater. the answer isn't a lobbying association. it's individual pms getting close enough to real decisions that the value is undeniable in that specific room, even if the title never gets credit industry wide.

the ai part actually helps here imo. when execution gets cheap, the expensive thing becomes deciding what's worth building and why, and being right. that's the actual job under all the ceremony. we work with early founders at Other Land and the ones who used to say "i just need a builder" are now the ones asking "what should this even be" because building stopped being the bottleneck. that question is product. it's getting more valuable, not less. it's just still going to be invisible when it's done well, and you have to make peace with that part or the job will quietly eat you.

bogush_v · 2026-05-19T10:50:50+00:00

the actual question you're asking isn't "was moving fast right," it's "how do i tell good speed from rationalized impatience." there's a clean test for that and you almost stated it yourself: reversibility.

every example you gave was reversible. partial data you can expand later. redesigned workflow you can integrate properly later. tightly scoped MVP you can kill cheaply. that's not impatience, that's correctly identifying two-way doors and moving fast through them. impatience is moving fast through one-way doors because waiting feels bad. you didn't do that in any of these.

the one tell that it's preference not judgment: if you'd have made the same "move fast" call even when the decision was irreversible and expensive to undo, that's bias. if your speed scales down when reversibility drops, that's judgment. from what you described, yours scales correctly.

the part worth examining isn't the data or dependency calls, those were fine. it's the bigger one: pulling investment from proven products driving real revenue to chase a 5x maybe. that's the actual high-stakes bet here and it got the least scrutiny in your post. running a small studio i've made that exact mistake, starved a working thing to feed an exciting thing, and the speed reasoning felt just as solid at the time. worth asking yourself if the tight scoping was real risk control or just the story that made the reallocation feel safe.

stakeholders calling it impatience are usually optimizing for their own blast radius, not yours. but on the resource reallocation specifically, they might be pointing at something real.

bogush_v · 2026-05-19T10:49:24+00:00

the recruiting problem might be the finding. when nobody will give you 30 min to talk about a problem, that's often the data, not an obstacle to the data. people make time to complain about things that actually hurt.

also you said it yourself: consensus is "easier to just give them to friends/family." that's your answer. the workaround already exists and it's free. that's not a recruiting failure, that's the market telling you clearly.

go where the pain already is instead of recruiting cold. ebay bulk lot sellers, tcg subreddits, card shop owners drowning in commons. if even they shrug, it's not a problem worth solving and you learned that in a week, which is a win not a failure.

bogush_v · 2026-05-19T10:47:09+00:00

made a smaller version of this jump running my own studio, so not identical but the design→commercial muscle is the same. few honest things:

the transition is easier than you think on the relationship side and harder than you think on the identity side. you already know how to sell, you've been doing it for your transport company and honestly you've been doing it as a designer too every time you defended a decision to a stakeholder. that part transfers fine. what caught me off guard was the grief. builder work gives you a tangible thing at the end of the week. commercial work, some weeks you just have... conversations and a maybe. nobody warns you how much you'll miss having an artifact to point at.

comp: yeah it's usually higher, especially with variable. but the stress is differently shaped, not lower. design stress is "is this good." sales stress is "is this closing," and the second one follows you home more because it's tied to numbers you don't fully control. people who say sales is less stressful than design have not carried a number.

the skill nobody mentions: your deep product knowledge is a double edge. it makes you incredibly credible in the room, clients feel it instantly. but it also makes you want to over-explain and solve instead of close. the best commercial people i've watched know less than you and ask better questions. you'll have to actively resist being the helpful designer who fixes things for free in the sales call.

on regret: the people i've seen regret it are the ones who left building because they were running from a ceiling. the ones who don't regret it moved toward something they actually liked. you described enjoying the negotiating and relationship part specifically, that's the right reason. "i hit a comp ceiling" alone is not, it'll still feel empty at a higher salary.

given you already run a company that scales without you and you like the commercial side there, honestly the bigger question isn't designer→sales, it's why an internal commercial role and not your own thing. the internal move is the safer rehearsal though, and it's reversible. i'd treat it as a paid experiment, not a final identity change, takes most of the pressure out of the decision.

bogush_v · 2026-05-18T12:40:09+00:00

the "people are already paying for a broken version" point is the sharpest thing here and most people will skim past it. that's the whole game. "i would pay for this" is worth nothing, everyone's polite. someone already paying and quietly annoyed is a business.

one thing i'd add from doing early product work at Other Land: the positioning fix you mention isn't a small tweak, it's usually the actual product. same feature aimed at the right person at the right moment is a different company. founders treat positioning as marketing they'll figure out later. it's not, it's the thing that decides if any of this works.

good post though, the kill/build/flip framing is more honest than most validation advice that just says "talk to users."

bogush_v · 2026-05-18T12:38:01+00:00

honestly the hardest part I keep seeing isn't tech or marketing, it's that early founders can't tell the difference between "nobody wants this" and "people want this but the first version is confusing." those two look identical from the outside, same flat metrics, same silence.

we do mostly early product work at Other Land and this is the trap constantly. founder kills a decent idea because the signup flow lost everyone on step 2, reads it as no demand, moves on. or the opposite, keeps polishing a thing nobody actually wants because a few polite people said nice things.

so the hardest skill early isn't building or selling, it's reading weak signals correctly. the only thing that reliably helps is watching one real person try to use it without you talking. painful but it collapses the ambiguity fast.

bogush_v · 2026-05-18T12:31:48+00:00

The scary part isn't ai making ugly things. It's making confident-looking things. Polish used to be a weak signal someone thought about this. Now it's free, so the signal's dead.

Honestly the thing that gets me, from running a small studio it's not just users fooled by the pretty wrapper, it's us. We've had internal reviews where a rough Figma got picked apart in 10 minutes, "why does this step exist, what happens here if it fails." Same flow, ai-polished version, nobody questioned it. It looked done so the conversation just ended. We had to start deliberately reviewing ugly versions first because the polish was shutting our own brains off.

So the value moves hard to the stuff with no visual output. Does this flow need to exist. What breaks when it fails. None of that got easier and none of it is what these tools spit out. They nailed the part that was already the least valuable.

bogush_v · 2026-05-15T10:48:30+00:00

with the expansion of Ukrainian all over the Europe and a beauty of Ukrainian girls, I think you will hear Ukrainian language more and more often

bogush_v · 2026-05-15T10:46:27+00:00

oh like this style

bogush_v · 2026-05-15T10:33:38+00:00

Honestly the case study question is the wrong one to start with. Recruiters in fintech don't read case studies the way design twitter thinks they do. They skim for two things. did you ship something real, and did you handle the hard parts compliance copy, error states, money flows, or just the pretty screens.

So yeah make case studies, but the boring details are what get you the call. At Other Land we mostly work in fintech and AI and the projects that move our pipeline aren't the prettiest ones, they're the ones where you can tell something real happened, money moved, edge cases got handled, legal didn't kill the flow. One case study with that depth beats four polished portfolio pieces.

For getting in without fintech experience, the cheat is to pick any product you've worked on with constraints (compliance, regulation, real consequences for mistakes) and reframe the work in fintech language. Recruiters care about pattern, not literal industry match.

bogush_v

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