Expectation vs. Reality As A UX Designer Working In The Big Four

Anecdotes from people working in Google, Facebook, Amazon and more

As I head into my sixth month of working at Googoo (the less formal but more “Googley” way to say “Google”), I think about some of the expectations that fresh grads may have going into work. If you have already interned at a big company before joining one, then chances are, you probably had these expectations before working.

Once you started work, you probably realized that some of your expectations aren’t really true. This isn’t a bad thing, but the reality isn’t always going to be ideal. There are going to be situations where you need to negotiate because x and y, and it isn’t always going to be smooth. You might not have all the resources needed to execute on a project because the company didn’t expect to be working on something which needed them. This is bound to happen in all organizations, regardless of how developed it is, and I’m here to challenge the assumption that just because you work in the big 4 or another established tech or design agency that you’ll have everything you need as a designer to do great work, because it’s simply not always true.

Along with my thoughts, I talked to a few other designers who are working at big tech companies and consultancies, and compiled their thoughts into an expectation vs. reality structure of what we learned as new grad designers. I hope this gives more insights into what to expect during your first design job, and that working at a big tech company isn’t the most ideal work environment for everyone.

Expectation: “Everything I learn at school is something that I will do at work!”

Reality: What is taught at design school isn’t often reflective of the organization.

I remember my first internship, and how it threw all my expectations out the door as I thought it was going to be exactly like school. Besides working on a project and trying to directly apply the skills I learned at work, I was learning how to apply those skills in the best way possible based on specific scenarios and different audiences.

“At school, we learn design as a linear process. However, in the industry, you need to adapt to the non-linear fashion of Product Design and the skills that are required at each scenarios. “Learning by doing” is what I’m truly experiencing at the moment” Geunbae "GB" Lee, Product Designer at Facebook

Based on talking to different students from different universities, I learned that not every program is perfect. If you want to do more research related work, schools like Carnegie Mellon or University of Michigan have a more established program for that, compared to my alma mater, California College of the Arts, which is better for hands on work. But regardless of these pros and cons, the skills you learn will not directly apply to an organization. Like I said above, you need to apply the skills you learn to fit the organization you work in. At Google, I don’t have as much of the luxury to create more time consuming deliverables, whereas in some other places, that might be considered the norm.

“Depending on where you went to school, you’re going to find whether your program lacked in any area or not. I can’t say much about the undergrad program at my alma mater, but the grad program doesn’t really help give you a picture of how design fits into the larger organizational process. Almost every organization is Agile and is trying to figure out how to best include design in an agile environment. New grads don’t really have a lot of idea around any of the ceremonies and why they’re relevant to what they’ll end up doing so there’s just so much organizational knowledge that they have to acquire/absorb when they start a job” Sujan Khadgi, Product Designer at URBN

Consulting is very different, and most people burn out because they aren’t prepared for that kind of environment. Sujan puts eloquently something that I had experienced while working in a consulting environment: If you end up working at an agency, then the way you work is totally different because you are working on billable hours. You have to really time box your work and be able to estimate LOE (level of effort) really well to ensure you get your work done within budget. Working as a consultant through an agency is always challenging because design programs teach you things that you’d mostly be applying at a product design organization/space.

Working with partners other than developers is a new thing too. You don’t get to collaborate with Content, Product, BAs or Brand at school. How you juggle all these personalities and their priorities is something you’ll learn on the job and you might not be prepared for it.

Expectation: “I need to have amazing visual skills to be a good designer”

Reality: A good designer doesn’t only make fancy visuals.

I talk about this often, but when I talk about what makes a good designer, it’s about how they communicate and drive projects. Driving projects can mean getting buy-in from stakeholders, explaining design rationale that is connected to business objectives and making sure the design aligns with a clear product vision. Good designers also possess great collaboration skills, opting to over-communicate rather than not communicate, leading efforts on their end.

Geunbae describes it perfectly. From his experience and mine, at school, we typically considered “good designers” as the ones who are working on cool projects that show fancy UI and prototypes. However, this is NOT the case and you’ll start to really feel what truly a “good designer” is capable of when you are in the industry. Really fantastic designers we’ve seen are the ones that are not only good at executing craft but also, lead cross-functional disciplines, drive vision, think about business and are humble and passionate about any projects that are highly impactful.

Expectation: “Because I am in a big organization that supports design, I will always be able to get work done”

Reality: Navigating through politics is a necessary “design” skill.

I was chatting with my mentor, friend and co-worker Jason Cho the other day. What he usually mentions to me is that in order to be really successful in a big company like Google and move up the ranks, navigating through politics will allow you to effectively advocate and sell your designs to the higher ups.

There will be political churn within companies. You will have to communicate with other disciplines such as PM and Engineering and compete to sell your designs. Some companies will also have really difficult executives who will not listen even if you have solid research backing up your POV. This is a situation I have yet to navigate through and I believe requires prior research to understand the best ways that executives receive information.

There can also be churn between teams too. For example, you may be working on a project that clashes with another team’s project, with a different set of pm or engineering goals. Often times both parties will need to compromise or push back because there will be chances where both parties can’t align on the same goals and that causes tension. If there is someone that is able to get both parties aligned, that unlocks more time for work and super collaboration! Super valuable.

Expectation: “Big company = big impact”

Reality: You aren’t always going to work on “cool” projects.

Angela Nguyen, a voice designer at Amazon, says that working at a corporate usually means having less design freedom and I couldn’t agree with her more. Because there are usually deadlines to meet, depending on the product you are working on, this requires you to prioritize which projects to focus on. There may also be constraints you will have to work with. At Google, we can’t just build anything and ship it; we have make sure we are designing towards a central goal and depending on the type of product that is being made, it has to cater towards guidelines that are cohesive across the product ecosystem.

In the beginning, you might not work on a product that you are extremely passionate about. Like Angela says, you can end up working legacy projects with incremental designing or ideation. These products have a multitude of different layers that work on top of each other and may take more time to see impact rather than a newer product with more room to shape it.

Expectation: Innovation can happen overnight and I can totally do that on my own!

Reality: Innovation takes time (and collaboration).

It can easy to get swept up in re-inventing the wheel and creating something that’s “innovative”. The reality for most innovations is that it takes incremental work for an overnight success to happen. Working in a big company, despite advocating for innovation, is that it’s slow and sometimes messy, due to politics and the sheer amount of people that are involved. If you want to be quick at achieving visible impact, a startup may be a better choice in that regard. This is because there are less organizational layers and more pressure to establish themselves.

Design shouldn’t always be thought out as innovative. Dreaming and designing for North Star solution is great but you also need to have the skill to come down to a more practical solution. It’s all about balancing idealism and practical scenario. Geunbae "GB" Lee

Also any kind of innovation requires collaboration. It will take more than one person to create something innovative. There are so many facets of a product, from marketing to manufacturing. I honestly don’t understand people who say that their success is something they got on their own. Always be gracious for the people who help you on the way and realize that one person’s success can be multiple people’s success.

Expectation: “I will collaborate with other designers all the time”

Reality: Collaboration with other designers can be common or rare.

Depending on the project, this differs, but from my experience and the designers I talked to, “rarely do you get to collaborate with other designers. You will most likely be the only UX designer on your feature team.”

Design collaboration is something that most teams in big companies don’t have time to do, especially in the product development process that has to take account of product and engineering goals. There are some teams that specialize in design collaboration and innovation at work, but the problem with this is that they could be planning features 2 to 3 years in advance, so it is hard to quantify impact during that time. At Google, it seems as though results are very valued so when it’s hard to see those results, it could be perceived as wasted time.

If you are someone who values design collaboration, companies such as IDEO are great in that you will find yourself working with many designers and applying many of the more design-centric skills learned from school into your everyday work. I wish I could use more design-like frameworks such as affinity diagramming on a day to day basis!

The reason why there may less design collaboration within teams in corporate companies is that there are so many products and features to support. I would if you were working cross functionally or working on products focusing on creative offerings, then there is a good chance of working with more designers, than if you were working on a stand alone product.

Expectation: “I will have all the resources I need in order to successfully execute this project”

Reality: Not all big organizations have refined design resources or processes.

This was something I was surprised with since joining Google. Every team has a more or less established process that is unique or similar to their product. I thought that all resources would be shared but there are so instances where it’s based on the specific product so it wouldn’t apply as well to others. This especially applies to research, where something like enterprise research hasn’t been done very much, compared to a previous company I interned at. From Sujan’s experience, some companies don’t invest in research as much and you have to either do your own guerrilla research or advocate on getting closer to your users to the right stakeholders. This makes including the user throughout the whole design process challenging, especially if a designated research team doesn’t exist in your team.

The way we present our process varies too! At Amazon, Angela likes to start with user stories because she learned to be very customer centric, but she found that some designers don’t do that. It’s surprising to hear this because there are companies like Intuit, that would value user stories and use them when explaining their designs, compared to Google, where I have seen less of that.

Despite being in a company that has established design teams, you don’t want to assume everybody knows about what UX design is. I have a habit of doing this because of school, where all my classmates would know what I talked about, but this won’t be the same in an environment that has people coming in from different backgrounds. Because of this, I try to introduce what I do to people with less knowlege of design and share my process before every meeting.