They get better
Ask HN: What Happens to Older Designers?
51–60 of 68 posts
Re: Ask HN: What Happens to Older Designers?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should always be networking over your career, regardless of who you are…
Really? What if you take a few year break from contracting? (a mini-startup, personal projects, perhaps you just get a regular job for few years to sort out your finances or build a house). Are you supposed to keep networking with your previous clients during this time when you know well enough you'll not want to take any jobs they may want to give you? Then there are all those people that transition between technolo…
Took a few years off and need to get back into the industry? Use the network you build while you were working.
Re: Ask HN: What Happens to Older Designers?
#53Many 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 St…
> I don't know the official job requirements, but I'd assume 7-10+ years of real actual digital product design work. 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 promoti…
I believe average tenure at Amazon was 1 year
Re: Ask HN: What Happens to Older Designers?
#54Re: Ask HN: What Happens to Older Designers?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree strongly. Personal referrals are one of the most effective ways to get a job, and also one of the most effective ways to increase hiring quality. At the very least a personal reference will fast track you into an interview stage ahead of most other cold applications.
There are edge cases where a personal reference is valuable. If you’re inexperienced, it can get you an interview. Or it can get you a job at a small company without a real HR department. 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…
What you're saying here sounds, to me, like the sort of thing someone who's only worked in a very narrow and constrained corporate environment would think.
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... .
Re: Ask HN: What Happens to Older Designers?
#56I'm 75. You will pull the keyboard out of my cold, dead hands. "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,…
I guess the OP referred to ageism as loss of job security. 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 maintaini…
At the moment it does not look like there is a really an issue with job security. Due to the high rate at which boomers are retiring the next generation which always was under the shadow of the boomers has become critical to keep the shops running.
Re: Ask HN: What Happens to Older Designers?
#57I'm 75. You will pull the keyboard out of my cold, dead hands. "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,…
What a wonderful message! Keep it up :)
Re: Ask HN: What Happens to Older Designers?
#58I'm 75. You will pull the keyboard out of my cold, dead hands. "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,…
Please sir advise how to become like you, thanks.
Re: Ask HN: What Happens to Older Designers?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt switching the backend to Spring Boot would reduce the speed of development much. You simply want to avoid having to reinvent the wheel, and plenty of languages have mature frameworks for that.
This sort of Java is almost all about boilerplate and patterns. Two or three decent engineers taking a few days to plan for the rest of the project can write 90% of the huge amount of boilerplate that Spring Boot needs. 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.
You won't ever need to do a major rewrite - the dynamic language web backends scale up to big levels (see shopify using rails for instance), and at that point your infrastructure will be challenging regardless of what language you are using
Re: Ask HN: What Happens to Older Designers?
#60Many 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 St…
> I don't know the official job requirements, but I'd assume 7-10+ years of real actual digital product design work. 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 promoti…
>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.