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What happens to ageing / older designers? What is their path if not for an inevitable pivot to management / product management?
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.
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.
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.
Good designers design irrespective of age. 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-the…
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.
Good designers design irrespective of age. 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-the…
> an older designer should have a rolladex full of people who they worked below, beside, and above over the course of their career 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 stereotype…
Good designers design irrespective of age. 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-the…
> an older designer should have a rolladex full of people who they worked below, beside, and above over the course of their career 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 stereotype…
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.
Good designers design irrespective of age. 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-the…