Bad UX made me do it
Last year I spent almost a full year trying to find a new job. I thought it would be straightforward. Twenty years of experience, a decent network, solid portfolio. I was completely wrong. I got ghosted more times than I could count. Hit walls I could not see. And somewhere along the way I stopped feeling like a senior professional looking for a new opportunity, and started feeling like an irrelevant has-been that nobody needed.
Rage against the machine
The anger came next. I needed someone to blame. The recruiter. The algorithm. The job market. The AI. None of it stuck, because none of it was quite right. Eventually I got tired of being angry and decided to switch focus. I wrote about it and it became one of my most recognized things I have ever published on LinkedIn. Apparently a lot of people were sitting with the same feeling and just needed someone to say it out loud.
Stop chasing waterfalls
I stopped chasing design jobs and enrolled in AI and machine learning instead. Suddenly I had purpose and agency. Instead of writing meaningless applications I wrote code, learned the math and principles behind what we lazily call AI. I learned more in a few months than for the past years.
Don’t look back in anger
A year later, with less desperation and more curiosity, I went back in. Two months of interviews with 20+ people across all sides of the hiring process. Trying to find the shape of the thing and understand how all parts fit together.
Wicked games
Hiring is a wicked problem. And what is happening to designers in this market is not one thing going wrong. It is many things colliding: the economics of design work shifting, AI rewriting what the job actually is, companies pausing on juniors, then seniors, then everyone while they figure out what a design team even looks like now. Wars, recessions, a post-pandemic hangover, organizations rethinking everything from the ground up. None of those things in isolation explains what happened to me or to the people I interviewed. All of them together do.
What I did not expect to find was hope.
Designers getting creative about how they show their value. Staying visible, building things, refusing to disappear quietly. Hiring managers pushing back against full automation, keeping humans in the decision loop, delegating the administration to the machine instead of the judgment. Small moves, but the right ones.
Here comes the sun
I do not know if this report fixes anything. That was never the goal. The goal was to understand it well enough to stop feeling like it was just me, and maybe to make the conversation a little more honest on both sides. That felt worth two months of unpaid work on a Sunday afternoon.