No hate for the middle class. I can’t help but enjoy the irony of people who thought they had solidarity with capital talking like Ned Ludd all of a sudden.
No hate for the middle class. I can’t help but enjoy the irony of people who thought they had solidarity with capital talking like Ned Ludd all of a sudden.
Middle class people are not working poor. Creatives are sometimes working poor, and other times are making $250k as UX designers.
And sometimes making minimum wage as UX designers.
Probably fall into the working poor category.
But I don’t know anyone making minimum wage doing UX.
Startups love to hire kids out of college who can do anything U, I, or X related with regards to tech. My first programming job I made minimum wage for the first few years and then got a $0.50 per hour raise before the company went out of business.
There’s FAANG and then there’s everyone else. Some jobs can be pretty bad in terms of pay. That first job also had a seasoned professional graphic designer with multiple decades of experience and she wasn’t making much more than I was.
That’s crazy. And definitely not the norm, even outside of big tech.
I’ve been in 4 startups, no one was making that little money even 20 years ago.
Yep, I’ve worked at tech places with bad pay but never “decades of experience and only making a little more than minimum wage”. Especially if they held a Senior title. It’s been a wild ride listening to their story evolve.
How seasoned could they be if they weren’t able to demand a raise or work somewhere else for more as a UX Designer? How could a seasoned professional be so close to entry level, and minimum wage?
Know your worth, companies aren’t just going to hand you money to be nice. Negotiate, and if they don’t play ball, prove you’re as good as you think you are somewhere else.
Not everyone lives in the bay area / silicon valley. Sometimes folks with tech talent live in more rural areas (or smaller college towns) and there may be only a few options around. It’s great that people have more opportunity to work from home, back then that wasn’t the case. If you did work remotely, you’d probably keep in touch on irc or icq and you’d periodically have a GoToMeeting or a WebEx conference (Zoom wasn’t a thing).
Also, skill level does not equal pay level. We don’t actually live in a meritocracy.
Some of us have been working remote since way before Covid.
Skill level doesn’t equal pay level directly, but if you have decades of experience in a technical field like UX Design and are still making close to minimum wage in the USA, that does sound like a skill issue.
Again, my guy we do not live in a meritocracy. If the businesses in your local area aren’t hiring UX (well at that time, they were just called “graphic designers” though they did UX work, we hadn’t defined UX as an industry at this time), then you don’t get a job, regardless of skill level.
You ignored the fact that myself and many others were working remote many years ago. Even using the old project middleman websites would have made more than minimum wage.
Why was moving impossible? Programming is full of foreign nationals who left their family, culture, languages, etc to try and make a better life for themselves but we can’t move to a different city and try?
Decades of UX Design experience, near minimum wage…
Victim Mentality