Having just left my full-time gig of the last 6 and a bit years, I am embarking on a new chapter of my own Design Leadership career through my consultancy, Outpost. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be an advert, but just some context for the thoughts that follow in this post.
As the kind of person who sticks around at jobs for a long time (I’ve had precisely two of them in the last 15 years), It’s a daunting experience to be staring at an empty calendar and not knowing yet what the near future holds, and whilst in my case it is with at least something lined up, I know that for lots of people the experience of waking up jobless on a Monday morning is a more traumatic one, and I know that amongst the subscribers here there will be many of you who are in this exact predicament. And so today I wanted to just give my sense of where our industry is at, what the hiring market looks like and to perhaps give some consolation to folks who find themselves back in the job market, and the job market being nothing like it was the last time they were in it.
The Polarisation of everything
The first thing that became clear to me as I started to look around at the market for design and design leadership roles is that we have entered into a period whereby lots of companies seem to have raced to the extremes across all sorts of things for which the right answer is almost always going to be somewhere closer to the middle. The whiplash of post-pandemic RTO policies has created companies which are now incredibly dogmatic about the specific desk from which web-based work gets done, and whilst in some cases that has created new opportunities, it has undoubtedly robbed lots of people of them too. For every company with a sensible location policy there seems to be a dozen for whom 3 days of commuting is now seen only as a marketable perk of the job and not also as an often inefficient use of time and energy.
Similarly there are companies for whom large language models are now not merely an ecologically disastrous technological curiosity with some limited utility, but are instead the critical and unquestionable fulcrum of the entire software manufacturing process which is not to be audibly doubted or - god-forbid - circumvented, even if it means doing worse work, slower, at higher costs.
Perhaps related to that, there is also a hollowing out of mid-career positions, with instead a focus on junior hires complemented by a small number of super-senior ICs and the mythical “player-coach-design-leader-magician”. Most people in our industry are - and still need to be - in mid-career IC level roles which for reasons not entirely clear to me are now unfashionable.
I know that for my personal tastes, the kind of organisation I like working in is one which is not dogmatic or extremist about anything, and is instead willing to flex, bend and adjust based on reality, and the changing dynamics of the world in which we operate. And because I’m a contrarian, I might even prefer to work somewhere that zigs when everywhere else is being convinced to zag by a chatbot, or by whatever it is that Amazon are doing. The companies that win rarely seem to be the ones that do things exactly like everyone else does.
Basic decency is in short supply
Perhaps it has always been this way and I have been blissfully unaware of it, but I am hearing horror stories from lots of people who are being treated with what feels like utter contempt from hiring companies.
A complete lack of feedback on case studies or spec work, job descriptions being changed part way through hiring processes, salary bands being reduced at late stages, and all sorts of really shoddy candidate experiences which seem ignorant of just how small a world tech still is, despite how it always behaves.
There is no world in which it is acceptable to ghost a candidate, even if there is a sense that the power balance in the hiring market has shifted back towards employers after a long-period in which they needed to fawn over candidates just to get them through the door. No doubt the high turnover of people in recruitment teams which are always amongst the first impacted in mass-layoffs is part of what is creating these broken processes, but it feels like it is more than just that.
“Leadership” as a nice to have
The final thing I have spotted on my travels around the hiring market is that for lots of organisations, technical leadership roles are being seen as a luxury and not a necessity, with design teams being moved to report into Product, or Engineering organisations. You see this most acutely with the rise in multi-portfolio C-Suite titles, whereby a Chief Product & Technology Officer, or a Chief Product & Marketing Officer is overseeing a portfolio which includes design, but which rarely treats it as an equal partner with the bits between the ‘C’ and the ‘O’ in their job titles. This obviously creates organisations which are sliding backwards on the design maturity index, and whilst it will create short-term cost advantages, it will also create brittle design teams who will themselves be more tempted to jump into the job market, even one as hostile as that of 2025.
It’s not you, it’s them
If you’ve been interviewing, I’m sure none of this will be a surprise to you, but perhaps there is some consolation in the knowledge that it’s not you, it is definitely them, and that this period will end and hopefully it ends with companies being less dogmatic about the way they operate, less shoddy in the way they treat candidates, and less blasé about how they structure their teams in order to help them build great stuff.