My first real design job was at a LGBT health organization that did HIV/AIDS care, research, and prevention. I often think about something I heard from a survivor of the early HIV/AIDS epidemic in a community talk.
Years into the HIV/AIDS crisis, when diagnosis was no longer a death sentence, when drugs were advanced enough to make living with HIV, well, possible, there was another HIV crisis. People who had been preparing for death since being diagnosed found out they were going to live. In addition to the psychological shock, they had to reckon with the fact that they had spent their entire life’s savings and run up huge debt. They couldn’t take it with them, and many gay men who had been abandoned by their families didn’t have relatives worth leaving it to.
I think about this story whenever the president tweets something batshit about the leader of a country with nukes and I’m struck by the urge to close up my Macbook, max out my credit, and travel the world as much as I can before we’re all vaporized.
Unfortunately, even if we knew the exact calendar date of the impending nuclear winter, maxing out my credit would get me a long weekend in LA, maybe. But the looming crises Trump stokes 280 characters at a time have had a real impact on another part of my life: my job.
I’ve been looking for new work. This has been somewhat of an open secret—like Kevin Spacey being gay, except I’m not telling you about it now to distract people from sexual assault revelations. My studio has been moving from project-based work to consulting and workshops, which are excellent and well worth bringing to your creative teams. I love leading the workshops, but it’s not a full-time job.
What if my last sunrise is spent finishing an email campaign template for Facebook?
The change in focus was shared late last year. Since then, I’ve had one eye open for design lead positions. Some prospects have been promising. I’ve come close to the brass ring a couple times; but these have been brief, happy scenes meant to endear you to the main characters before they are shredded in the horror movie that’s just beginning.
Hunting for a new design job has been an existential nightmare. It’s not that I’m unqualified or that people are uninterested. It’s not that “the jobs aren’t out there.” It’s that job descriptions that match my background—and frankly offer a living wage—look like this:
Designers come here hungry. Hungry to learn, hungry to dive into big projects head first, and hungry to grow their skills as part of a killer team of thinkers and doers. You have the passion, talent and drive to collaborate with cross-discipline teams and a desire to define the next generation of digital shopping and customer experiences.
Listing after listing demands not only skills and experience but fervor. You must be obsessive. I saw a job posting, I shit you not, seeking a designer with a “passion for InDesign” as a pre-requisite. I don’t even expect the product designers who work on building InDesign to be passionate about InDesign.
The job posting that broke me, however, read:
Design and art direct. Complete production files. Push everyone at the agency to do better. Create solutions, not problems. Watch the sun rise. Win awards. Realize it was all worth it. Do it all over again.
If I close my eyes, I can visualize the rapid-cut stock footage of cars zooming by and rockets launching as designers put sticky notes on a glass wall. An early 40s male voice-over actor reads this job posting. Shortly after “watching the sun rise” and “winning awards”—as a happy, multicultural team who does not hate their lives at all congratulates each other on a job well done—the atom bomb drops.
What if my last sunrise is spent finishing an email campaign template for Facebook? One of the saddest moments of my life to-date was drinking alone at my desk in the middle of the night, working on a similar project at a previous agency.
Maybe Mueller will save us, and we won’t fall into complete autocracy or nuclear winter. But even if the worst is avoided geopolitically, death is inevitable for all of us; and as I’ve searched for jobs I have asked myself, “How many of my remaining nights on earth will be spent losing sleep because a pixel is out of place?” (Yes, I have also seen job descriptions actually looking for designers who are kept awake by misplaced pixels.)
I don’t expect the industry to cater to my values. I’m just asking: do the current state of things really reflect your own?
Will that pixel matter in the end? Will half the shit we build? Design can create social impact, yes, but just because something is designed doesn’t make it meaningful.
The answer seemed simple at my first design job, which was in direct service to the health of my community. That pixel mattered. And at Mule, I was never asked to stay past 6 for the sake of a pixel.
Having had jobs that offered meaningful work and a chance for a full life outside the office, I decided I would hold out for those things. As my search extended into the new year, though, nerves gave way to nihilism. Maybe my next job didn’t have to be personally meaningful if it was challenging enough, offered learning opportunities, and kept my very demanding dog in kibble.
I interviewed for a senior communications design position at a financial services start-up. After a very pleasant call with HR staff, during which I learned I’d be overpaid to make infographics for their blog, I was told I definitely made it to round two.
Round two, it turned out, was an unpaid design exercise that would take me “no more than four hours” and would be reviewed by the hiring manager from the design team to decide if I moved on to a 30-minute call with someone from the team for which I was interviewing. 5 hours and 2-rounds before getting to speak to someone who could actually tell me about the work I’d be doing or the team I’d be doing it with!
At this point, I had to see what the design exercise for a Senior Putter-of-charts-into-shapes-of-things looked like. It was to put a chart into the shape of a car following the brand’s guidelines.
Design can create social impact, yes, but just because something is designed doesn’t make it meaningful.
I wrote the lovely recruiter from HR to let her know I wasn’t moving forward and why. Creative leadership who ask candidates to create Facebook graphics as a design exercise are hiring for the wrong things. The exercise made the work seem boring and inconsequential. A company that asks a job-seeker to invest 5-hours before anyone from the hiring team invests 30-minutes doesn’t value people enough for me.
And I realized, I have to say the same thing to the larger tech and design industries. We hire for the wrong things. We’re solving the wrong problems.Even companies tackling interesting problems are doing it in a boring way. We don’t value people enough. I’m not interested in moving forward.
I don’t know what this means for my next steps. I have things lined up. Some of them are still design-related. Some are exploring new interests and skills. Maybe one or two will pan out. Maybe in six months, I’ll be putting infographics into the shape of cars.
What I do know is after taking these last several months to consider what matters to me in light of the opportunities out there, I’m not excited by what I see. And I can’t help but think that if more designers did this, the industry would look a lot different.
I also know some folks will probably accuse me of being a snowflake. Those people haven’t worked with me. (Anyone who uses “snowflake” unironically can also go fuck themselves.) I don’t expect the industry to cater to my values. I’m just asking: do the current state of things really reflect your own?
But what I know most confidently is that anything keeping me up at night from here on out will be larger than a pixel.
