Finding work as a designer - Jakub Stasiniewicz

00:00

I had a great colleague who was always telling me, "You have more value than what they pay you." And he liked to criticise the company in some way, obviously it to go to the point when I was like, Oh, it's just talk and got tiring, but move to another company where I asked for salary, they offered me more than I asked for. And that kind of opened my mind. Having the right people around you kind of can shift your mindset a little bit and kind of make you turn around into see what your worth.

00:29

What decisions did you make earlier on that you think have made the biggest impact on your journey so far?

00:36

I wouldn't say decision, but shifting the mindset of work is great wherever you work at the time. But in the end is work and business often has not... I'm not saying... there are companies that value their employees and so on, but often they will put business objectives and their goals and aspirations over your personal kind of goals and whatever you want to progress they will prioritize their own benefits over you and making that shift from working long hours and harder than, you're actually paid for back technically because, you're paid for your work that you're delivering in your hours in the contract.

01:20

But making that shift from being kind of loyal to that employer even though they don't deliver and being that just kind of one sided transaction from that you kind of spend lots of hours, you spend lots of time and kind of sacrificing your spare time, even though maybe you shouldn't, or maybe you should and turning it around into, okay what do they offer for me? What benefits I get from the company that it's not only, one sided transaction that the company should also benefit, you should also benefit from the company. And whether it's through personal development program or having support of other colleagues or whether it's good salary or pension or whatever it is and those benefits.

02:08

I think it's important for you to kind of understand that you're not only there for the job, but for the company, but company should be back there for you too. And shifting that kind of mindset made me realise that, Okay, maybe the company that I'm currently at is not fully appreciating me and maybe I should look for other options out there on the market and see what's there to offer.

02:35

And the other bit was with the whole COVID that happened because working in digital industry, I'm not going to lie, there are benefits from COVID and having the market opening in London, for example for people who work remotely, more remote opportunities allowed me to, for example look for higher salaries and companies that are much more established than where I'm currently based. I didn't have to hire myself to the companies that are near me, but I could actually kind of get a full grasp of what's there in the UK, talking to different companies, what they provide, what I can do for them and so on.

03:19

What was that time early on in your career where it flipped for you and you spent less time thinking about what you could do for the company, and you spent more time thinking about what the company could do for you?

03:31

Part of it could be that I had a great colleague who was always telling me, " You have more value than what they pay you," And so on. And kind of created more... He liked to criticise the company in some way, obviously it go to the point when I was, "Oh, it's just talk," and it got tiring. But over the time, I moved to another company where I was actually, I ask for salary, they offer me more than I ask for. And that kind of opened my mind and my head. And then as I worked there for a few months, I started feeling more appreciated. And I started seeing the value of the work that I'm providing, while at the previous company, it was more kind of, it was agency it was kind of do it quickly, do it that way and so on.

04:17

And "Oh, good job. Maybe if you work hard enough, the next year will give you a raise." Having the right people around you kind of can shift your mindset a little bit and kind of make you turn around into, see what your'e worth. And then another bit, I think is once I sign up to cord, because you have lots of recruiters reaching out to you on LinkedIn and could be every day, if you set up your profile that you're open for opportunities, they can get few recruiters a day at a time.

04:48

But with cord, actually having people from those different companies, contacting you and writing to you and without recruitment and saying that, "Oh, we are interested in working with you." It kind of blew my mind at the beginning because I had so many companies that I didn't even apply to. And I was "What's going on? Why are they all like contacting me?" But yeah. And ended up to one company was interested in hiring me and we kind of... They contacted me again on actually on Saturday when I was initially I was, "Yeah, I'm quite happy where I am." But they contact me on Saturday. So it must be important. So I'll talk to them and see how it goes on. What's going on.

05:25

Do you think that what you've been through there, where you are trying to make sure that you're paid what you're worth and you're valued in the right way, is any of that specific to UX, do you think? And are there any particular parts to working in user experience that make finding work different if you are in a different domain?

05:57

One of the bits that is connected to UX is that, UX is quite new field. It's not that new, but it's a new and kind of industry to the point where lots of companies don't fully understand what UX is. What that brings is that their expectations are for example, that they expect you to know how to code, they expect you to know, bring other skills, like visual design, which could be part of, if you are working the smaller industry, company that you have to handle visual design and so on, do UI too. But there are companies that confuse those terms. Because of that there are companies that under value the UX work in a way, so they offer much smaller salaries that other fields provide in the same industry. There is a little bit of kind of, I think UX is still growing and there's still people kind of get more conscious about what it is, how it works, what it's worth and how much value it provides to the business.

07:00

And because of that, it's a bit still kind of shaking in that way. I started from kind of graphic design field and moved into UX. And I've seen that the same thing happening in graphic design and visual designers, those small companies that kind of don't fully understand the value of digital kind of industry. They don't understand how much work it is and they might provide much smaller salaries for whether it is front and developer UX, UI, graphic designer, because it seems simple, you look at the graphic, or you look at some flow chart, then, "Oh, I could make it, in a few minutes. Why would it take a week or something?" Right?

07:45

How do you work out whether a company that you're talking to does value user experience?

07:52

Comes out during the interviews. Make sure you ask the right questions, make sure you understand the structure of the company and where the UX sits in the company. I've seen companies where, for example user experience was part of marketing team and for me that was straight red flag because, as long as marketing is doing their marketing [inaudible 00:08:20] or marketing research, this is completely two different things and it shouldn't be mixed together. So there's lots of bits that you have to kind of get the feel from talking with, during job interviews, don't be afraid to ask questions and to kind of, even if they might seem questions that are not easy to answer, for whoever is interviewing you, but don't be afraid to do that because you might dodge a bullet if you landed a company that actually doesn't value UX, or it happens that they underestimate UX work. If whether for example, agency they might put much smaller estimates on UX because for example, they feel like it won't take you that much time, but they have no idea what UX is or how it works.

09:07

The other bit, for example, if you want well established UX company, looked into companies that already have this UX team, especially if it's your first UX job, make sure that there is someone who can support you. There's someone more senior, someone who already can kind of build the structure of where UX sits in between the company and in the process of developing whatever, whether it's new app, new website and kind of has this structure already outlined there, because there's often might be that, for example, you join a startup company, and I'm not saying that startups are bad because there's lots of that you can bring up like learning the startup industry and you'll be hired very hands on and get lots of experience, but you probably won't fully get that kind of feeling how, where UX sits and how it works all together. If you won't actually spend time outside of work and learn in your free time and go to [inaudible 00:10:05], talk to people and bring that kind of knowledge back into your company.

10:09

How do you decide what size of company you want to work for? Because like you said, at a larger company, UX is very different and the expectations of UX designer is very different to you're a small startup. How do you go about deciding, how did you go about deciding what size a company you wanted to work for?

10:30

To be fair, I was always around kind of midsize companies. I had an internship in a startup when it was just, I don't know, six guys, and it was great. We had great time. And I enjoyed working there over time. When I was finishing my uni, I wanted to get a bit more experience and I wanted to join a team or someone who can mentor me while I go through, progress in my career. So that was one of the biggest and most important parts for me. It wouldn't matter for me if it's extremely large, big company, because in the end you work in digital team, digital squad, company might be 10,000 people, but your team is like 10 or something like that. I assume mostly mid-size companies are usually agencies, consultancies and stuff like that, where you work in those teams too, and you have few designers, lots of few developers and so on.

11:28

So a mid-size company, it doesn't change that much. You will still work in your team as long as you have someone to work with. And I think that's biggest plus for a designer where if you don't have ideas, you have someone to talk to and kind of bounce ideas off, learn the craft and kind of get a bit more of that feeling like, okay, kind of build your confidence. For me when I was looking for jobs, I wanted to get a position in UX industry while finishing digital design. And it's really hard to get your first job in UX industry. At least it used to be a few years ago. There wasn't that many opportunities in UX. And that's why I'm where I am currently. I moved to this city because I got a job here.

12:12

So I didn't really have that much choice back then, especially there wasn't that much remote work on... My screen went black. Okay. There wasn't that much remote work. So, I had to kind of whatever I found at that time that was related to UX I decided to take it. If I had other options, probably I'll be leaning more towards a bigger, more structured team, but I joined first, I had just one senior UX designer. And I kind of learned quite a bit from her.

12:42

Stuff that's popped up a few times, your search for others around you to mentor you and guide you. How have you gone about that?

12:53

From the beginning when I joined my first company and the second company and now I'm in my third one, there is always some senior, more senior person that you can reach out and ask some questions, whether it's checking if criticising designs or looking into the approach to research or kind of learning that kind of... Because there's, I think quite a bit of knowledge that you might learn from books, but that kind of practical knowledge. You need to gain it over time and you won't learn until you do it. So having this kind of more senior person as very beneficial. The other thing that I did was I was invited to something called intrapreneur course, which was kind of UX course where I actually got another mentor assigned outside of work.

13:51

He also kind of... It was just a kind of conversation about what I do, what I'm struggling with and he always had some kind of suggestions for how to go about it. So, yeah. And also at my previous company, we also had digital team. We contacted our Ops team saying that, "We want to lift our designs quite to the next level." We got a person that was from the outside of company with lots of experience who was working at Google and other companies have had his own agency to help us out. And we had kind of mentoring sessions with him. So we can just to understand what can we do to lift it up and become a better kind of company and agency and kind of improve our design processes across between developers and so on.

14:45

How did you know when the right time was to move on to the next thing?

14:50

I don't think you ever know. I think with my first company, I knew because I kind of hit the wall in the way. Okay, I won't really progress much further here in a way I had... Every year we had annual reviews I went through. I was there for two and a half year. I got another review. And while I got from out of it, I was like, I don't think that's going to work. It's time to look for some other opportunities. And-

15:19

Why wasn't it going to work for you in that moment?

15:21

One of the aspects was I felt a bit under-appreciated in the way it was, one of the aspects was salary wise. The other was appreciation of my work that I was producing. Even though at this point I was the only UX designer at the company. And I was handling all the project work that they were doing. Because those agency, we had two senior designers throughout when I was there, they left and I was left alone. So I had to handle all the work. But in the end after two years there, I was still on kind of junior level salary. And it was kind of, they told me that if I will work hard, then I might get another raise next year. So at this point I got a bit frustrated and I kind of told myself, "Okay, let's see what's there on the market."

16:15

And the second job I got was through a recruiter on LinkedIn. She contacted me, we went through it. Yeah and ended up working for that company. And I really enjoyed it, and I didn't plan on changing, but out of curiosity, I actually created account on cord and I was contacted by another person from my current company. And we started talking and the offer that she gave me was kind of too good to refuse. So at that time I didn't plan on leaving, but so I was at my second company around 10 months, but it's just happened. So sometimes you might feel, okay, I'm ready to move on because I feel like you want to progress further in your career. And if you have that feeling that it's time to move on and you won't do it, I think it's a mistake. The other time it might be just it happens by a chance.

17:14

It's almost like there's not a time that's too early, but there's also not a time that's too late.

17:21

Personally. I always kind of had that feeling like, oh, I don't, if I move a company, I don't want to leave too early because it would look bad on my CV. Why would I leave a company after a few months? But if another company kind of reached out to me, even though they know I haven't been that long at my previous company, then why not? And at this point, I'm at my new company, I'm quite happy here. And I feel I would stay here for a bit longer. So that will kind of I think, cover for the previous one.

17:57

How do you assess when you are happy in a position and then you are contacted by someone and you go through that process. You must set a pretty high bar there because you're not kind of desperate to look. What kind of questions do you ask? What things are you trying to understand in that moment that would allow you to then do something different?

18:24

I think from UX perspective, just kind of understanding their design process and design work is great. This is one aspect because, ambitious about what I wanted to do, in the future in the way, Okay, I want to progress in my career to get to that kind of principle level at some point. So seeing that they worked, for example, my current company works in completely different way than the previous one. They don't work in a way that is kind of, as we used to call feature factory, which is kind of develop and release and don't work on it ever again. They actually work in a way that you improve your product, you look into what's wrong. They work in kind of squads where even though it's consultancy, we create squad from people from few different teams and different companies.

19:16

So if there's a change, we have a person from our client side, from the stakeholder side in the team that is a product owner and she pulls the trigger on whatever it is. If it's some, let's do a research, let's investigate that. We don't have to go through all this kind of politics of, it'd be great to do this research, but we need funding and so on. It's just, we can just plan it from sprint to sprint and just do it. So that's one of the things that kind of convinced me because I was struggling with that my previous place. The other bit was just understanding who are you working with, how many people is there? How the company's culture is? If you think you'll fit in and then of course benefits play a big role in that and the salary they offer. So if everything is on plus then there's no reason to say no. I think you have to consider where do you see yourself in the future? And if that place allows you to get there and progress your career further then why not.

20:26

How do you know how much you are worth?

20:27

I think that's a tricky question. You never know, I think. You might have some idea but the trick is that of course all the companies will try to kind of undervalue you so they can pay you less. There's under rare occasions companies will try to offer a salary that is actually on the market that, you'll be happy with or it is a bit hard question there's I don't know if you have seen that. It is quite big on Twitter recently where some recruiters said, "Oh, I offer this job for 80,000 but we could pay out 220, but she doesn't know that and she's happy with it." And people were like, "Why would you do that? If she has experience, why wouldn't you offer her the whole amount of value of the money?"

21:19

So, that's a trick. I think a lot of looking to the market, trying to contact the different companies I wouldn't say accept the first offer you get, try to reach out to different organisations, see how much they offer you. Try to kind of write it down and make your notes. I think for me, there was a process too. I talked with few companies. What I liked about cord actually too, is that the salaries are outlined there most of the time I think some companies try to hide it. I don't understand why. There's this whole kind of weird, I think social aspect where people don't talk about their salaries. And I think that's a mistake because those big organisations will try to make the most out of it. So it is a tricky part.

22:11

Thank you so much for breaking down your experience. Jacob, I've loved it. If anyone wants to reach out to you after this, what's the best way for them to do so.

22:22

Yeah. They can reach me on LinkedIn, I think. I'm usually checking in every day. So if anyone wants to talk about their experience or whatever it is, or wants to hear more from my kind of UX search for the job, I'll be happy to share more there. But yeah, I think LinkedIn will be the best.

22:45

Love it. Thanks man.