vogt

Hey good call! I thought mine was, but thanks for correcting.

Truly, I think I just find the design work mundane at this point - maybe just by virtue of doing it for so many years. I do a lot of coding work (throwaway UI component prototypes, that kind of thing) and am finding more joy there.

But part of it too is that I work at a big financial corp who are a great employer, but our tools ecosystem and ability to share work with the outside world is _incredibly_ limited. Just a common trade-off of working at such a company, and I understand why that has to be. But nothing fulfilled me more than shipping things at a startup or small, nimble company. Hoping I can get back to that when our family is a little more comfortable financially.

>I'm not sure your point stands any scrutiny. Titles such as principal engineer or staff+ levels are not granted by seniority or at an anniversary.

OK, fair enough - instead of guessing, I went and pulled up some current job postings:

-Staff Product Designer @ DoorDash: "You have 8+ years of experience as a product/UX designer in a relevant industry"

-Staff Product Designer @ Opendoor: "Experience: At least 8 years of relevant experience as an individual contributor on an in-house product design team"

-Staff Product Designer @ Mozilla: "5-7 years of professional product design experience"

-Sr. Staff Product Designer @ CNN Digital: "12+ years professional experience, specifically as a Product Designer

-Staff Product Designer @ Ro (Roman): "8+ years of experience shipping high-impact and successful digital products across mobile and web at consumer-facing/focused products and brands"

So to me, the OP question wasn't "What makes a Staff designer?" it was "What happens to designers as they get older and don't want to pivot to management/PMing?" The answer I was attempting to give was "It looks like there are lots of Staff/Product+ roles opening, which may be good fits for such people." Maybe the main hangup you found was my reference to FAANG/FAANG-adjacent companies, and I may have been off the mark there.

And make no mistake about it, I won't hide it - I'm definitely wish-casting here as an old guy in the design industry myself.

Many go into management, as you say. In my experience the best managers were never even remotely the best designers in terms of pure raw talent. That is sorta secondary to your question, and just kinda my own personal inject. At the same time though, I think it supports the idea that staff/principal/"Distinguished whatever" titles for design serve a use case. In fact, some BigCos have adopted that model similar to Staff Software Engineer, etc. FAANG/FAANG-adjacent types. I think Amazon, Slack, Discord have staff+ level designers. I don't know the official job requirements, but I'd assume 7-10+ years of real actual digital product design work.

I imagine we will see more of that. People like me who have been around a while or longer are getting older, and not all of us want to pivot to management. Can't even imagine doing it!

I've been in this industry for ~10 years, and am getting pretty burnt out on it. Lately though things have been better. If you stick around in the field and find an answer to this question...reach out and let me know? :) Best of luck!

This is truly one of the best moderated places on the internet IMO, and one of the only places after 20 years of posting on message boards that I can go without hurtling toward a flame war every time I log on nowadays. Part of it is, I'm opinionated and I think probably enjoy arguing more than might be reasonable sometimes. Another part though is that the moderation quality is so high here and so low on places like Reddit + Twitter. My 2 pence.

Probably the lack of ability to advertise here the way you are encouraged to do on Twitter/FB/IG/Reddit (because they need that revenue) factors in as well.

Maybe GP could have framed it more like: "Here's how can you use that for good" rather than simply "That's good". Because I agree, desperation is not good in the aggregate.

I’ve never had stock options in the first place if that makes you feel any better.

Yes, good point. Sketch has better vector tooling but also to your point, if that matters to you enough you’re going to likely just use Illustrator or one of the smaller offerings like Affinity for your work (or the majority of it)

This is another thing Figma gets super right. It's not simply a design tool for UX people, they discovered that people were making things like marketing ads, business charts and API architecture diagrams in it and doubled down, providing free templates and resources for those people. For example: https://www.figma.com/templates/google-cloud-diagram-softwar...

Then a step further, Figma opened up a Community resource where people can publish their own, which are so simple to consume. My wife is the general manager of a dog kennel / daycare facility and I have made several posters and documents for them in Figma.

Ok, I have a lot of experience in this area and recently was a key contributor in migrating our 200+ person design department over to Figma from Sketch beginning in early 2022.

The only thing I can't speak to is the first point since all of that evaluation and decision making process was routed to people far above my paygrade. So to your other bulletpoints:

2. There are many alternatives to Figma - the industry standard in UI/UX design was Sketch from about 2013. Figma began really emerging in 2017-2019, and then skyrocketed in marketshare during the COVID pandemic[0]. uxtools.co is a great resource for data around this - not just as it pertains to the current Adobe/Figma context but as a year-to-year "State of UX design tools" pulse check.

However, and this is key: not one competitor holds a candle to both the amount of features and designer-friendly implementation of said features that Figma has. I have seen some of the staunchiest "It's just another design tool, it'll be replaced! Sketch is fine! The tools don't matter, it's your UX skills that are most important" crowd capitulate the superiority of Figma after getting to dig in for a while.

Sketch has been falling behind for years and hasn't even began to catch up. Other competitors like Adobe XD, UXPin, InVision Studio feel like clunky stripped-down Figma knockoffs in comparison. Webflow and Framer are too niche in my mind to be considered competitors: those are GUI-based low/no-code landing page builders. Those do not serve the needs of a UX practice, especially one at scale.

Someone will see this comment and say "but, Penpot!" Sure, that is potentially a viable competitor, but it is still in infancy though they did just raise a big round [1]. They went live I think mid-2021. And virtually nobody knew who they were until the day the Figma acquisition was announced. I would estimate that the adoption rate among mature teams right now is effectively zero. It looks like a great product and I am so thrilled someone is putting out an OSS design tool that looks competent, but it is far too early to call them a competitor as far as I am concerned.

3. Not that I've observed. I am sure they have aped some of Figma's features in XD in the last handful of years, but looking at the XD landing page now, the product looks the same to me as it did in 2017.

4. The biggest fears among my industry peers that I have observed:

-Fear of Figma being bundled into Adobe Creative Cloud, which is viewed largely as an annoying workflow dependency that only exists to keep recurring revenue going to Adobe and interrupt you with an update modal from time to time. People really hate OS-level depedencies that suck precious RAM. This is another reason people love Figma - they understand that nobody wants both Figma AND the "Figma Cloud Uploader" running 40+ hours a week on their work Macbook, bogging your system resources down. This was another point InVision fucked up - having the Craft suite running behind Sketch all the time is a shitty experience.

-Fear of Figma becoming less performant over time. Adobe products became synonymous with the pinwheel of death on MacOS. There have been a crop of memes in the design industry social realms [2] visualizing that future.

Figma have done some brilliant work in performance and architecture. Many of their engineering blog posts have been shared on HN. The post about building a plugin API, IIRC, generated a lot of discussion [3].

I only mention that because Figma leadership are saying that Adobe wants to learn from Figma's team on how to improve performance and architecture of their existing products. If THAT is true, then that actually strikes me as a win-win for everyone: if Adobe leaves Figma to their devices but uses insight from them to improve Adobe legacy products, I feel like everyone wins.

Of course, this could all just be honeymoon period, "grand plans post-acquisition" talk from newly minted wealthy folks. Lots of designers are expecting Adobe to take their enterprise chainsaw to Figma and fuck it all up for us. I am trying to be optimistic. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Figma fanboy and have been doing advocacy work (for free, stupidly, but whatever) for them for years. I hope the team will continue to build on what was a revolutionary change in design tooling for the industry. They insist that this is the case and that they and Adobe are committed to keeping things that way. Most people I know in the industry are not so positive about it.

[0] https://uxtools.co/blog/7-takeaways-from-2020-ux-tools-surve...

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/28/penpot-an-open-source-rival-...

[2] https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*nWwTmO_oNUjc3537

[3] https://www.figma.com/blog/how-we-built-the-figma-plugin-sys...

This is so insightful, thank you so much for posting it as I have never seen the article yet it clarifies so much I have always hypothesized. I’m curious if there is any level of transparency (anywhere, not simply the US) as to what PR firms work with specific groups of publishers. Of course I highly doubt this, but I’d love to trace the origins of a lot of these coordinated narratives.

I wish I knew, I think about this problem all the time and have yet to come up with a feasible path. “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it”

To add some context (not refute), the mainstream media stories (Yahoo, WaPo, NyPost, Free Beacon) I've read that talk about this all reference this same report: https://safeguarddefenders.com/en/blog/230000-policing-expan.... It's a lengthy topic I am curious about but have no background in. But for context my understanding is these claims come from a pan-Asian human rights watchdog NGO based out of Spain.

I was curious and looked up whether there was an address or vague location RE: the claim that there is one such police station in NYC and didn't find one though I did skim through ~50% of the PDF by Safeguard.

It seems like every day there is a new article on Business Insider or Forbes or Fortune about how remote workers are the scourge of all things workplace related. Almost feels like a semi coordinated push from executives (especially those with commercial real estate interests in one form or another) to pay to have stories in these outlets to shift the hive mind in a direction that favors them.

Oh yeah, great point you're making there. This type of thing never happens anywhere else.

Plenty of us do, and did during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. That didn’t stop those invasions just like Russian citizens protesting the current war won’t stop Putin’s doubling down. To assume everyone in Russia toes the party line is unfair to them.

I always got a slight feeling that he was a bit of a creep in disguise, but looking back after having watched, I don’t know, maybe half of the videos on the channel currently, I think that he intentionally brings interviewees in off the street exactly as they are. I believe the studio is near skid row in Los Angeles and that many of them are invited to film in whatever they were wearing that day. Whether or not that is appropriate or germane to the end goal of the channel is debatable, but I do feel like he is simply trying to show these people “as is”, with no production varnish

Makes me feel a little better seeing someone with my same thought process. I don't know why. But I do the same thing, and think the same thing.

I don’t fly anywhere anymore. People are too rude, disruptive and just plain gross. I did a 15 hour drive to Tucson recently in lieu of flying. Ate up two days of our vacation but screw it. No regrets apart from my butt going numb a couple times.

Me too, which is why this whole incident and some of the posters here reaction to it is so strange. They never should have entered the goat into the 4H show.

Fair enough. I agree.

I disagree. As there is a sales office at a livestock auction who are paid by buyers expecting to take delivery of livestock they just paid for, a third party is involved. So it is not as cut and dry as “never mind, I’ll just give you your money back.”

How many livestock auctions or 4H shows have you attended? If the answer is greater than zero, which I truly doubt, how many did not require the entrants to understand that entering your animal is putting it up for sale?

Not sure why you’re repeating this comment in multiple places, but given that you are, I’ll repeat that this is not wrong, as I pointed out to you here: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=32704877&goto=threads%...

Except I’m not wrong:

“On June 24, 2022, accompanied by Plaintiff Jessica, Plaintiff E.L. exhibited Cedar at Shasta District Fair in the junior livestock auction.”

Since we’re making assumptions about each other apparently, I’ll assume you’re from San Fransisco or Toronto or some other urban center where livestock auctions aren’t common. So allow me to inform you that the purpose of a livestock auction is to bid on livestock which most of the time will end up being bred or slaughtered.

I don’t mean to attack you here, but I feel like it isn’t fair to paint my side of the argument as one of non empathy. I wish that the Shasta Farm Association and the dickhead that made the purchase would have said “let’s let it go”. But they didn’t, and I don’t agree that some egregious civil rights violation happened as a result. That is simply my opinion.

What are you talking about? Is everyone who responded completely unfamiliar with agriculture and 4H programs? The animal was bought to be auctioned, and WAS auctioned at the 4H fair. The article literally says the girl had a breakdown _at_ the auction.

> It's perfectly acceptable to violate a contract. It doesn't matter you're not a fan of this. As long as you follow through with the terms of violating it.

You are either being voluntarily ignorant or pedantic, I’m not sure which, but of course it doesn’t matter if I’m a fan of it. You know who also is a fan of enforcing contracts? The state, when they fund an agricultural program you sell an animal through and then don’t hold up your end of the bargain.

The parents were the ones who confiscated someone else’s property when the goat was sold. But yeah, I agree, they do, you’re barking up the wrong tree if you think you’re going to stick it to me with ACAB sentiment because I am no fan of the state or police. I am a fan of honoring contracts and sales.

The goat became property of the new owner when it was sold at auction, which the family knew they were getting into. I hate defending someone who clearly was being an asshole in this situation by not having the heart to say “This little girl is clearly attached, I can simply buy another goat”, but there were no rights being violated here that I see.

Look, I’m an animal lover and what a nightmare for that little girl, but I don’t think that her parents did her any favors by not preparing her mentally for what was to come. The animals being sold at auction is part and parcel of the 4H experience, or many families will opt to have the animal slaughtered themselves. It sounds like they brought this goat to auction where it was sold and then tried to re-neg on the sale. If she bonded that closely to the animal they should have kept it on the property and not brought it to the 4H show. They almost tacitly admit this in offering to repay the income brought into 4H by the goat.

A number of years ago there was a dog being given up that my wife and I wanted to adopt off Craigslist. It was being given up by a family who - you guessed it - “didn’t have time for her”. This was in Weatherford TX which was over an hour from our place in Dallas. We got halfway there before the woman who placed the ad called us asking us to turn around, because her 8 year old daughter was having a breakdown after the realization that their dog was about to be rehomed.

Six months later they emailed us asking if we were still willing to take the dog, otherwise it was going to the shelter. At that point we had already taken on another. I hope it didn’t wind up in a kill shelter all because these parents couldn’t help their child deal with reality. This story reminded me of that.