What happens to ageing / older designers? What is their path if not for an inevitable pivot to management / product management?
"Nobody knows you are a dog on the internet" Ditto being aged ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
Most of the technologies I play with - HTML5, webGL, Three.js etc - did not exist ten years ago. So it's a level playing field.
There's more open source stuff on GitHub that needs help and mentoring than you can shake a keyboard, er, stick at.
My digital afterlife is destined to be a thought-leader for generations to come. Fingers crossed.
As I started to understand that I am a designer, I came to realize that my own life is open to being designed. Day in and day out.
It turns out that that my design of my own life is one of my better efforts. ;-)
What’s been your experience? Not everyone is a Spiekermann, Esslinger or Rams. Have you lost out to the newer crowd… more and more folks finish these 3-6 month UX boot camps and not all companies value experience or understand it’s not just about pixel pushing.
Or does OSS design help pay the bills? I’m guessing getting involved in OSS is more about maintaining the design muscle and helping folks out.
Next question.
I mean an older designer should have a rolladex full of people who they worked below, beside, and above over the course of their career to break out when they are looking for something interesting to do.
A career is an ecosystem that grows or atrophies based on the careers that surround it. The most important connection to the rest of the ecosystem is will-they-go-out-of-their-way-to-work-with-you-again.
That's true whether a potential move is up or sideways.
Good luck.
As a non-traditional professional in a lot of ways, I've found these kinds of assumptions at the core of a lot of discrimination (age and otherwise). A person should be judged based on their skills/value, not based on where someone thinks they "should" be in their life based on stereotypes and bias.
Expecting a person to be a certain way due to their age is harmful to them.
Then there are all those people that transition between technology stacks. I did that few times so far (Linux to Windows, then Windows to Linux, vmware to aws). Your past clients will most likely want you for the stuff you worked on in the past. Also some people relocate internationally, perhaps to different time zones. Among people I came to know over the years many did that.
So I find this idea of "constant networking" work in a very narrow set of circumstances.
I just understand that that is a problem that wishing the world was fair in ways that benefited me won’t solve.
If the OP doesn’t have the Rolodex of people who would work with them again - like me - then it is a problem.
Or possibly a symptom of a deeper issue of why people don’t want to work with them.
Or possibly the result of bad luck.
Or some combination of all that.
None of which “it ain’t fair” changes. Either a person is so good they can’t be ignored or they aren’t. And sometimes what can’t be ignored is a chip on the shoulder.
[edit]
The comment points to reasons a younger designer may tend to be a better hire.
A younger designer might ask “what’s a Rolodex?” and then start filling theirs up instead of arguing about it.
It is easy to work with someone who is still learning. It is unpleasant to work with someone argumentative.
Came to understand that the hard way.
Just curious since even as someone who sucks at "networking" and that sort of thing, I feel like I've worked with people that we mutually respect each other's skill regardless if it's direct reporting lines.
Not that I am unhappy.
Rather that instead of having delusions about a professional career, I have a day job and pursue artistic practice and live in paradise.
I go with the luck I have and don’t waste energy over the luck I don’t.
But outside of that, a hiring decision made based on a personal relationship is considered cronyism. It isn’t always illegal, but most HR departments go out of their way to prevent it.
“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is terrible career advice in general. It can be incredibly seductive because it promises people an advantage over competition. But it’s wrong. It’s a waste of time and in my experience, the people who follow it tend to interview poorly because they come off as arrogant and complacent.
Of course, if that sort of environment is all that one's interested in, then it's possibly entirely true.
It just isn't, at all, for someone like me who's not existed in that sort of environment for over twwnty years... .
Software development changes all the time, developers constantly have to upskill. Trends drive demand and NIH runs strong in the industry. There is nothing we're doing today that couldn't be done with Java for example.
Design on the other hand is interfacing with humans. Humans are meat sacks who hardly evolve or change, in fact, you might argue, they regress. For this reason, ageing as a designer is really not as challenging as being a developer. Sure, there is the newest shiny CSS frameworks, and people abandon Photoshop for Sketch then Figma. Etc. But overall, it's extremely stable. Trends, skeuomorphism, flat, neo-flat... whatever the industry do, the adaptation isn't too bad. If anything, since we moved away from skeuomorphism, we lost a whole lot of true pixel wizards. Anyone can design flat buttons, but the stuff that interface designers were doing in the early 2000s is a lost art. But I digress, overall, humans don't change, so design is a safe industry to age in. Source: I'm both.
Wow. Strongly disagree.
One might say not as agile as starting to code from day one, but I'd rather take an extra week than risk a major rewrite in the middle of development.
I'm sure you understand that iOS's problem is not technical but business constrains.
> An OS kernel?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JX_(operating_system)
> Anything real-time?
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!
PS your profile needs an email address if you want folks to reach out ;)
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. They are granted if an individual meets all the technical and organizational requirements, as well as career accomplishments, that make a case for a promotion. You don't get that just by sitting at your desk.
Also, principal engineers at Amazon, a company renowned for the average SDE career spanning only around 2-3 years, tend to have been in the company for over a decade and comprise a very small fraction of the whole engineering community.
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.
They are brought to the farm. The slow country life lets them recover from the burnout/stress.
In all seriousness, discrimination isn't universal. If someone doesn't hire you because of your skin colour or age, someone else will. Their loss, not your loss.
There's being physically young, and then there's having a 'Beginner's Mind', which is something that one can have at any age – or never grasp at all.
This is inspiring and what a great way to think about working & retirement!
They will be rounded up and killed as part of the "not economically viable" class when Dalle-10 comes out.
Unfortunately the same will happen to us when Copilot 15 hits the market.