Comment by yoobi55 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yoobi55 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm currently a solo UX at a start up, and I have dabbled with FE dev for past few years.

I am a bit frustrated with how the FE operates with this company, they don't seem to care about ensuring good UX, I'm not even involved in their sprint cycle, they just build things AND THEN ask me to fix the UX if someone points out how terrible the products are. (And obviously with TONS of restrictions saying the codebase/architecture wouldn't allow it - smh)

I understand I'm still new to the company(4months), but this has been by far the worst design-FE collaboration I've ever experienced. I tried to schedule a meeting to address these issues in a professional manner, but they canceled it and said it's not important for the company now.

I really take joy in solving problems for people with good UX but now I just come in to work to design CEO pitch decks in PPT and get paychecks... the pay is alright but it is really not rewarding at all professionally. Should I jump this ship? Do you guys have any advice for me?

I do think in some ways, because UX is constantly being pushed back even though it shouldn't be...you do kinda have to learn to work with what you've got. Programming is like that too. There's weird restrictions from legal, stupid restrictions from the platform, some off the wall glitch that you have to work around, etc. Sometimes small UX changes are hard to implement in code and it ends up not being worth doing.

I haven't worked in a startup before. But it's strange to me that a start up would have someone on hand who's work is "not important for the company right now." Aren't startups supposed to run lean? If they won't even -talk- to you about it I feel like your options are limited. If you could actually discuss it, then yeah, maybe you could figure out how to move forward. But 4 months is a long time to not be contributing at all. Though I know that security and UX both suffer from being pushed to the side in favor of new shiny features.

I would:

A.) Have not a full blown meeting, but a 2 minute conversation. Figure out a short example of how not planning UX ahead of time has failed and is hurting the business currently. Then explain "We could prevent this by..." Present problem and your solution.

B.) Use this time to study. This would help with the startup(once they get themselves together) and also your career. Maybe you need more FE dev skills to figure out how to fit the UX in with what they are doing.

C.) Yeah, start putting feelers out. I personally would hate to sit there not contributing. Don't just quit(I assume you need to eat), but there's no harm in just talking to people and seeing what's out there if you really can't make it work at the startup.

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