Product designer rant

Looking at the sad state of UX market in India makes me think about the scene few years back. In 2018-19 many folks who found coding or other roles a little difficult switched to UX. UX design was glorified even more by few design influenzaaas as if its the only coolest job left in IT. Most of the experienced designers we see today are earning good but shit in their pants when asked to do good visuals. They are good at talking, use lot of UX jargons and give gyaan on Linkedin comments and constantly ridicule designers who are good at visuals to sound intellectual. We don’t see talented illustrators, motion designers, vfx folks get the appreciation they deserve. Also these skills are difficult and takes hell lot of practice to master and has a high entry barrier as well.

Field is saturated and you will seriously struggle to find work. Not gate keeping, just laying out the reality. If you're up for the challenge then good, if not then you should look at some other fields. Product design is kind of weird now and is tougher than you think. It is no more a creative field where you can come up with unique ideas or have fun creating stuff. It is intoxicating, tedious and requires constant fighting with the stakeholders, listening to your micro managers and implementing stuff they "ordered" you to do disguised as feedback. Did I say, it is mostly copy work nowadays and portraying it as a whole new feature/design that is unique to your org/team? It’s 1% creativity, 99% stroking the ego of your managers and bosses just so you don't get laid off. (Not at capgemini, burner account)

been working at a product based startup as the only ui/ ux designer for over 6 months now. work is usually solving for and designing new features, or thinking redesign from user grievances. the products were already designed for them by an agency before my joining and feel poorly designed to me, but does the job for the users. decisions regarding usage and the how-tos of implementation are taken by the product leads. in such a scenario, i don't see myself taking product decisions, but i try to suggest my ideas (mostly accepted) when we frame the requirements and solutions. how do i grow from just largely only designing what my leads tell me, to actually making an impact with the products we have? background- i'm an electronics engineer, landed a design internship at a startup a little before graduation and they offered a full time role after. accepted it over my placement and it's been over 6 months in this role. thanks & cheers :)

Anyone who works there/has heard something about the company about its culture/product market fit/runway etc? Any leads would be appreciated 😄

I've been in this field for about 15 years now and post-covid this field has become a borderline joke and I feel embarrassed about Design in India. Do not think that Designing involves ONLY a lot of Visual Design work, importance to "craft", motion design etc. The kind of work you need to do should involve a LOT of user research, planning, testing, domain knowledge, technical knowledge and actual hands on design work. I don't get to do a lot of it today but back in the day it was all that we were taught by our Design Leads. Now because of these influencers whenever I tell people that Design is innovative and based in Behavioural Science, they assume that my work is easy, doesn't take much time, I just have to design screens etc and I keep on explaining to them that you're wrong and there's more to it. Thanks to clown influencers, kids think if they follow these clowns they can get into FAANG or some top tier company. I'm really scared of the state of Design in India 5 years down the line when these design kiddies become more senior.

Im a Product Manager 1yoe in a SaaS startup. I had a good experience in the first year. I got to build a product 0-1, competitor analysis, work on creating prioritization frameworks, UAT, content marketing, wireframing. However, since January the compamy started their stabilization phase, and PM's are now taking care of Sales and lead generation(Content, Ads etc.). The nail in the coffin is we are getting dragged to follow up renewals( Customer Success) 🤢 Im currently motivated to building something new, and it feels like we are being dragged into everything as the company does not want to hire. With no pay hike or any adfitional benefit. Please advice. Should I look for a new job?

I am reading very often that the craze around product management is too much and this career is not worth the hype. Adding on to that it has huge supply of PMs and many of PMs are underpaid. Is it true?

Mostly so called "Design Leaders" "mentors" are always spewing gyaan in my office, LinkedIn, social media but actually fail to implement those stuff. Every other week we have this call where designers are supposed to talk about a topic and every designer comes with such complex presentations, use big words as if they are saving the world or something. They unnecessarily complicate such simple topics and then go on to call themselves designers 🤡