Why are product designers so pretentious?

Whenever I overhear someone say that, "Can you just make it fast? It's just a simple design, so it shouldn't take long, right?" it makes me a little pukish. 🤡

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.

Share what you're feeling about the market & other things around you?

Sad to see the degree awareness & lack of common sense in young budding designers these days. Me as a Product Designer get asked- what are you doing in an IT MNC?Did you shift to IT? How much designers can make at max, it must be bad, right? I regret being a designer, aren’t you? #speechless

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)

I recently had the chance to interact with a couple of product designers from the Bangalore startup scenes. The huddle also included a few who are quite active on the LinkedIn community - where they constantly talkabout craft, user empathy, design principles and what not! But when you really listen to what they are saying - they are just all fluff and no meat. They just want to beautify things for the sake of it. There’s no depth in understanding the users. When asked “What measures do you take to empathise with the users?”, this senior and ‘awarded’ designer casually answered - “ We just go with the VIBE!” I MEAN, REALLY? Looks like the marketing effort that goes into building their social profile is all these designers care about. The future of UXD scares me. Sorry for the betrayal, users. 💀

In early startups specially in b2b, product designers are not designers they're rather design support. Always restricted to reach till minimum viable ux. Though whatever gets shipped at the end is better from past but power of shaping product is largely placed at PM's table and engeneering table (feasibility). Now you can avoid complaing and show high agency, partner with PM in defining Product but the default power house is still PM, not the designer. Also you don't have time for this because designs need to shipped to add to next sprint. At the end you just take a deep breath and sigh because you made something better, bit better if not far from what existed before. I guess high impact/ product definition work gets done by designer in big orgs only not only early age startups.

It seems unfair to me and others like me who are trying to get into the industry. People who are in the industry very well know that they didn't get an entry because they did some Jony Ive-level work. The majority of them simply got lucky in 2021. Now everyone wants superheroes in the name of product design. I wish I was doing the same job search in 2021, things would have been different.

How bad is the design job market now in India?is there an over