I've been working in this industry for over ten years now, from freelancing to full time, to contracting and again freelancing and consulting. Believe me, I have been through quite a few not so pleasant experiences and I think that by sharing them you will see the whole picture of this design and tech industry.
You might think that as a designer, people hire you for your creativity and also experience in user research, testing and designing soooo many freaking interfaces, but NOPE!
Once I had a contract at a company where I lasted only one month. I simply couldn't take it anymore. The owner kept arguing with me about everything that I was proposing. Imagine doing all this work, thinking about ideas on how the product should look, how to attract customers, basically how to make some money for this guy, and hearing all day every day "NO, NO, NO, NO, I know what the customer wants Dennis I didn't hire you for your expertise!".....Ma ma donna
The company wants to make money so they hire a team that can help with taking the idea and transforming it into an actual product. Your role is to think about how this idea will look like and also how the user will interact with it. So most of your time you need to be creative, because you want to create something original, but not too original because it might scare the users away. 80-90% of your time you are thinking about solutions and answers, even to questions like, what should this button do and what colour should it have?!
I've only met a couple of developers in my entire life that understood my designs from the beginning and used their logic in order to develop a product with my designs. Most of them need further confirmation on how the product will function, they keep asking for stuff that is already there at their disposal, they need to be spoon feed all the time, and this is quite frustrating because I think most of the time they do it on purpose anyway. Nevertheless, the way it works is that we need them and they need us so love it or hate it, for now, we need to learn how to work together.
My parents still don't know what my job is. I am not going to even mention my grandmother and grandfather. But even people my own age or younger, especially those people that do not work in tech, look at me like I am an alien.
Every single time I have to explain like:
THEY: What do you do?
ME: I am a UX/UI designer
THEY: Ok...
ME: I am like the architect but I do blueprints for websites and apps and stuff
THEY: OK...
ME: I draw dots and circles and rectangles in paint.
THEY: OK, I get it now....wait but how do you make money doing that?
Jokes aside I think that even with the negative points, being a UX/UI designer it's still an amazing job, way better than most out there, and if you learn to cope with these bits, as in any other job, then you learn to enjoy it and even discover nice companies that value your input.
