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The UX job market REALLY sucks right now

Why you should pivot and change directions right NOW

Melody Koh 🤔
Prototypr

Credit: Unsplash

I had to change the title of this article a little bit because another medium writer beat me to it, but the sentiment remains so let’s get to it.

I do a something I call a “twenty application test” every quarter where I will send out my resume to 20 companies who are hiring designers to see if I can make the cut.

I’m not the kind of person who will send 100 resumes and accept 100 rejections; as someone who was a hiring manager and also a seasoned job-search artist, the sweet spot for me is 20 applications with a resume format change every 5–7 applications.

And the results this quarter are the most shocking for me, because the amount of interviews I got was a big fat zero. A 100% rejection rate from the first screening.

This has never happened before, not even during my junior years, not even a quarter or two ago in recent history.

So I repeated the test with a junior mentee’s resume, and got another big fat zero. What does this all mean?

We’ve all been expecting this, and I’m smiling as I write this because I’ve again managed to successfully predict the market’s doom but here it is:

The UX bubble has finally…

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Responses (39)

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The job market pendulum has indeed swung in the opposite direction. Back in 2021-2023, when I was trying to hire for my agency, it was incredibly challenging. The high salary demands and the competition with candidates juggling 3-5 other interviews…

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We went the wrong direction at many critical turns, and this struggle is our karmatic result.

I'm genuinely curious what you meant by this.
How is it designers' fault that most businesses nearly always treat good design as a nice-to-have-afterthought? How is it our fault we've had user-unfriendly practices (Agile, Scrum, etc.) shoved down our…

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Well that’s cool. But what is UX? I read or skimmed your entire article and couldn’t figure out what you are talking about. I have a guess it means user interface? I’ll google later.

As a naturally talented software engineer the first 20 years of…

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