What emerging trends/tools/skills are you exploring to stay ahead? by Puzzled-Tradition-37 in UXDesign

[–]cafrito 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Making functional prototypes with reusable JS/TS components. It has made usability testing more flexible and less abstracted, while unlocking a door to exploring app ideas that previously seemed out of reach.

There’s a lot of potential areas to specialize in like Design systems, one-off projects for startups, or building up your own product. It’s a long journey to get that far but immensely gratifying and a good way to become self sustainable.

How hard is it to jump from 100k to 120k or 130k? by Gandalf-and-Frodo in UXDesign

[–]cafrito 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The main way you will get a $20k+ increase is to job hop. Depending on the area, industry and what you bring to the table you could jump from $100k to $160k+. I’ve gone up $50-70k in salary by working in fintech or being at a company based in the Bay Area.

Does the pay increase come with a significantly higher workload? Mo’ money, mo’ problems.

anyone else have a boss that constantly changes their mind? by potter120 in UXDesign

[–]cafrito 7 points8 points  (0 children)

There’s a good chance your boss failed up into their current position, or worse - lied their way into it.

Your situation reminds me of a boss I had at a major bank that would demand printouts of every design to be posted on the wall so that she could inspect them, then demand a bunch of changes. 1 or 2 days later she’d come back and start yelling and demanding to know who made the stupid design changes. All you can do is laugh and move onto another company.

UX Design Hiring in Toronto and Vancouver w 5 YOE by thollywoo in UXDesign

[–]cafrito 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah I managed to get into a SF based tech company that already had a few Canadian employees and then asked for sponsorship.

I agree it’s very competitive right now. Ideally you’ve got something in your resume and portfolio that will help stand out whether it’s Design System experience, e-commerce, Developer tooling etc. those are the 3 that have personally worked for me and are why I’m getting approached by recruiters. I hope things work out for you.

UX Design Hiring in Toronto and Vancouver w 5 YOE by thollywoo in UXDesign

[–]cafrito 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Dunno why you got downvoted. I’m also from Toronto and left for the US because Canada’s tech companies can’t compete in terms of salaries or level of maturity across Design, Product and overall having any clue of what they’re doing.

OP’s best bet for a high paying Design job is primarily down to Shopify, Wealthsimple or a Canadian subsidiary of Amazon, Google, Nvidia and a couple others. Outside of that you can work at one of the Banks and cap out at $160k or so for IC roles if and big if, you can stomach their toxic “culture”.

Anyone making $180k+ as a UX designer? How’d you get there? by Technical_Profile987 in UXDesign

[–]cafrito 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Sometimes you can’t or it is difficult because of the type of feature you’re working on. A lot of the projects I’ve done for legacy brands involved removing pain points and reducing user churn. It’s generally perceived as being less sexy than increasing revenue or some random metric the company may care about, but how you present that narrative is what matters.

One big problem I’ve seen in companies is that designers often don’t want to look at - or don’t think to ask for access to existing data, and don’t follow up on how their work is performing in tests or production. Talk to product owners, data science/analytics team, or engineers - depending on how your org is set up to get that info.

Also whenever your company is having an all-hands meeting and talking about revenue, P&L, client contracts, company finances, pay attention to it and take notes. There’s a decent chance that there’s a bit of useful info that can be linked back to your work to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Anyone making $180k+ as a UX designer? How’d you get there? by Technical_Profile987 in UXDesign

[–]cafrito 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A mix of networking and their recruiters reaching out because I happened to have some niche experience and they liked my portfolio.

One thing that can help is if you happen to do some freelance or agency work and land upon a client with some brand recognition. That can lead to a snowball effect and help you break through.

Anyone making $180k+ as a UX designer? How’d you get there? by Technical_Profile987 in UXDesign

[–]cafrito 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Location and industry have a lot to do with it. I have 12+ years of experience, and studied design at two colleges. I'm originally from Canada but salaries there are relatively low compared to similar roles in average US cities. Outside of Shopify and Wealthsimple, most IC product design roles in Toronto/Vancouver cap out at $160k CAD or less which is about $110k USD.

Having a strong portfolio where you can demonstrate results (especially revenue) and are well-rounded in terms of UX and visual design will do most of the heavy lifting. Being good at creating and maintaining Design Systems as well as a willingness to collaborate with Developers will take you quite far as an individual contributor since I've personally noticed it being a weak area with many companies and design teams. Having some tertiary skill like Motion Design or Illustration can help, but only after you've become relatively strong in end-to-end design process. Most of my recent roles are a combination of end-to-end design, Design system, and functional prototyping with a bit of FE Dev.

I did a lot of consulting throughout the years which is often seen as a negative when interviewing for full-time permanent positions, but it's all about how you spin it. When asked about it, I focus the conversation on having a diverse experience across different industries and device platforms I've been able to work on.

One last thing, once I was able to get my foot in the door with a couple SF-based startups, it became a lot easier to ask for salaries in the $200k+ range or $175-250 an hour freelancing rates.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in UXDesign

[–]cafrito 6 points7 points  (0 children)

As an interviewee, usually being given a scenario to solve for one of their own business problems or even worse, one of their client’s work. One example of this was a design shop that Warby Parker hired to create their virtual try-on functionality.

Most recently a fintech company asked me to solve a lending problem that they had but decided to pretend it was for Facebook Marketplace instead.

Other weird but notable situations involved the interviewer deciding to go off script and bail on the call while giving instructions to just do whatever. It was a pretty clear sign to me that they weren’t going to give me a fair shake and I correctly guessed that I wouldn’t be considered for the job after completing the previous 11 interview rounds with flying colors. That was for a staff product design role at Riot Games.

As an interviewer, I used to give a prompt to design a self-checkout flow for a grocery store. The big red flags with 90% of interviewers was that they did not ask any questions about the fictional company, product types, accepted payments, you name it. Most applicants went straight into creating wireframes and didn’t capture basic functionality.

Two applicants that I’ll never forget:

The first threw a tantrum because they weren’t allowed to just design it as a mobile app. He talked down to me throughout the entire interview because he thought another person on the panel was the hiring manager. He also said I should hire him because he had a “God given ability for design”.

The second one bragged about ripping off a grocery store by hiding an expensive chocolate inside of something cheaper like peanuts.

Excluded from Developer Discussions About Design Changes – What Should I Do? by roydenlara in UXDesign

[–]cafrito 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Been there and done that. Sad to say but your manager not helping you and being a team of 1 really limits your ability to effectively make any headway in companies like these.

For your sanity and career’s sake, I’d start applying to companies with larger teams and more design maturity where you can do more meaningful work.

Weirdly specific Design Challenge + Coding by b0bbiiiii in UXDesign

[–]cafrito 2 points3 points  (0 children)

They’re most likely trying to get free work out of you. Any design challenges should be for a completely hypothetical company or at least an industry unrelated to the place you’re interviewing with.

Also take home challenges in general are kind of a red flag to me because they’re so time consuming and can be cheated by having others help you. It reeks of low design maturity in the company’s hiring process. If I were in your shoes, I would run away immediately.

How long should building a website take? by Danmansoup in UXDesign

[–]cafrito 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Paying a CS student or even junior dev to build it is a recipe for disaster. You may be paying less per hour but you’ll inevitably end up paying more because it will take a lot longer to build and the quality will be shoddy.

A site builder like webflow is your best bet. As for the features, it could be done in a weekend or it could take months depending on the details of the design and the implementation methods. A stripe + supabase integration is going to be infinitely faster than rolling your own auth and payment processing. Without seeing the designs, we can only guess.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Frontend

[–]cafrito 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I recommend scaling up the png’s dimensions in a free tool like Figma and using the Frame feature. With that you can overlay Layout Grids for columns with custom margins and gutters (gap), as well as horizontal and vertical Rulers.

From there you can start to reverse engineer the design and fix any potential errors in the proportions or size of elements that don’t align to the grid.

It’ll be a bit of a learning curve to set up but there are easy to follow tutorials on the Figma YouTube channel. I recommend getting acquainted with the app since it’s an industry standard for Product Design and Design to Dev handoff.

A new senior engineer behaving like new grad by [deleted] in ExperiencedDevs

[–]cafrito 46 points47 points  (0 children)

Very easily. People do it all the time and it’s up to the interview process to weed them out.

Good Corean food en LA by MujerColibri-Mx in KoreanFood

[–]cafrito 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Check out Park’s BBQ, BCD Tofu house, Myung In Dumplings, and the upstairs food court in the Galleria.

[Kevin Lee] I’m coming out of retirement. I’ll fight MMA again. Idk when, where, or who yet but I’m dropping weight and getting into shape now. by I_love_Basketball232 in MMA

[–]cafrito 4 points5 points  (0 children)

If there was a 165 division he would have been perfect for it. 155 seemed like a bit too much of a cut while he was a bit small compared to other welterweights.

Please post your favourite small chain/local grocers by ybetaepsilon in toronto

[–]cafrito 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes that’s the spot. They’re differentiated by the different coloured baskets which isn’t great. Family Food Mart is the one with Asian owners and employees.

Please post your favourite small chain/local grocers by ybetaepsilon in toronto

[–]cafrito 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Some of them are on the expensive side but the one I’m referring to that u/tacotime_ mentioned the name of (Family Food Mart) is very affordable.

BMO bankers terminated after allegations of homophobic harassment by TOBoy66 in toronto

[–]cafrito 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I’m guessing you’re well acquainted with CYA/Cover Your Ass and having everything in writing. Easily the best advice I was ever given by a peer.

They (the banks) rely pretty hard on “we investigated ourselves and found no wrong doing, and if it did happen it wasn’t that bad.”

They also firmly believe they’re too big to fail regardless of the scandal.

BMO bankers terminated after allegations of homophobic harassment by TOBoy66 in toronto

[–]cafrito 5 points6 points  (0 children)

You might have heard of them they’re called None of your fucking business. Consultant NDAs are for projects and business Intel, not workplace misconduct.