We partnered with the amazing team at Hired.com and created this survey to better understand the state of the industry and get a clear picture of the employment situation for creatives. Thanks to our good friend and amazing business analyst, Eliran Zagbiv, for his help in analyzing the results. Here are the overall stats of people who took the survey:

3,167 participants

from 57 different countries

23.6% women and 76.4% men

The TL;DR - Our insights

We hired an analyst and drilled down and sliced the results. What's presented below is the direct findings, exactly as we received them from the survey, but it's important to mention that they are of course biased toward the Hacking UI audience and may not reflect the entire industry. For example:

Significantly more men than women participated.

A large portion of the participants were from the United States.

Most of the participants were designers or had designer-related job titles.

We also saw some interesting facts, some that aligned with well known stereotypes of the industry, and others that broke those trends.

Designers that work in agencies tend to make less money than designers that work in companies. We all probably knew that. Even the best agency in the world would not pay as much as Facebook for a skilled product designer. Does this mean that new grads and newbie designers should aspire to work only in well-funded companies and startups? No, of course not! But this survey is about money after all.

On average, women tend to make more than men over the first 8 years in their design career - and then it changes and men start to make more.

The level of job satisfaction level was almost identical across all job titles and point of career in terms of years and seniority.

So how can this survey benefit me in any way? Well, first off - knowledge and knowing the real, hard facts based off of real data - not just gossip. We all aspire to be more data driven, right? Well here’s your data.