Companies seem to be hemorrhaging designers. What's happening?

Today, my former colleague Ben Gaddis raised a question. "Companies seem to be hemorrhaging designers," he said. Why is this happening?

It's true; although it’s not just design enduring layoffs, the struggle is real right now in the market for design services.

To understand current times, we have to look at the last couple of decades.

How did we get here?

In the early days, there might have been one designer for 20 devs. That designer was a graphic design generalist who learned UI design on the job. Many design decisions were made by engineers and project managers. You remember those interfaces.

Over time, companies:

• Sprung for more specialized talent (interaction designer + visual designer + UX researcher, rather than a graphic design generalist.)

• Put more designers on the team, staffing one designer per 4 or 5 developers rather than 10 or 20.

• Hired design talent at earlier stages.

But education still hadn't caught up. Designers discovered specialized design fields largely through adjacent roles, bringing lots of related experience to the table. In conferences and online, some early UXers scolded one another about what it meant to do things "the right way".

Demand for design far exceeded supply, a gap that coursemakers soon sniffed out. Bootcamps started playing in this gap, and universities began to launch programs.

When Covid hit, digital experience was thrust even further into the forefront. Without physical events and storefronts, online was everything. To stay ahead, big tech began hoarding experienced talent at salaries 3X and 4X what those professions had previously earned.

At the same time, Covid was democratizing online learning. With bootcamps and conferences going fully virtual, people around the world could now learn things previously reserved for students in Silicon Valley. Those who had lost jobs in a whole range of Covid-impacted fields saw an opportunity to "get into tech", signing up to gain the qualifications for this high-paying, human-focused, often-remote creative role.

New technology (Miro, Figma, WebFlow) and practices (design systems) vastly improved efficiency for design and how it collaborates with development. Engineers and product leaders could now dabble in design more easily than ever, sometimes using these newfound powers to work around rigid designers that slowed down progress.

As Covid subsided, the volume of entry level design candidates worldwide surged to unprecedented levels. Hiring managers were faced with a dearth of experienced candidates, and budgets that couldn't compete with MAANG premiums. They had no option but to hire folks from the new, inexperienced cohort, who still expected salaries like the ones they were originally sold on.

Tightening the belt

Now, as the PPP loans run out, interest rates rise to levels we haven't seen in a long time, and inflation makes everything more costly; every department is feeling the squeeze and layoffs are certainly not limited to design alone. But I believe that execs are looking at internal design team budgets in particular and asking, "What's this line item where costs have increased by 3000%? And what are we getting for all of this spend?"

Last in, first out, as they say.

To get things done, teams are leveraging whatever is practical and accessible. This may be an agency partner that makes it easy to ebb and flow as needed, a part-time freelancer, piling extra hours onto the remaining design team, or leveraging the wireframing skills of product or engineering teammates.

Where will things go from here?

Here’s what I predict:

• Teams will get tired of hacking design and will push to restore design investment when budget opens up.

• Salaries will stagnate until supply and demand find a balance.

• As the market returns, expectations will have shifted; designers will be measured less by their ability to execute Figma screens and more by their impact. Product teams will value designers who can facilitate, research, challenge, communicate well, and think critically.

• Companies will continue hiring specialized talent, but roles will not continue to splinter.

• The divide between design systems designers and business consulting design roles will continue to grow. Design systems teams will serve product, dev, and design, while business consulting design roles will serve the business and the user. They’ll all work together.

• Conversation design and design for language-based interfaces will become more important.

• Product Management and UX (as well as its new rebranded title of “Product Design”) will increasingly overlap - something we may eventually have to untangle.

• The ratios of how each role spends its time will change as AI scoops out portions of the workday.

• Entry-level design jobs will remain hard to find as AI eats up tedious production-oriented tasks.

• Interest in design bootcamps will wane, though it won’t disappear entirely.

• Many of those who trained over the last couple of years will continue to struggle and will eventually settle into other paths (adjacent or entirely different.)

• Perhaps most importantly, we’ll see waves of further recalibration as the impacts of AI become clear, a process that will continue throughout the next decade.

There are many layers to the answer of why companies seem to be hemorrhaging designers. What did I miss? What do you think will happen?