Got an email last week from a design student asking: “Is UX design a good career?”

Honest answer: Depends. Do you enjoy explaining design decisions to people who think “make it pop” is actionable feedback? Can you keep a straight face when someone who’s never used Figma tells you your spacing is “off”? Are you comfortable being overruled by a PM whose entire design portfolio is a mood board they made in Canva three years ago?

If yes, it’s a great career. Stable work. Decent pay. You get to solve interesting problems.

If no, you’re going to be very frustrated very quickly.

Because here’s what they don’t mention in the bootcamp brochures: most of your time isn’t spent designing. It’s spent defending your design decisions to people who couldn’t center a div if their quarterly bonus depended on it but somehow have very strong opinions about your button hierarchy.

I’ve been doing UX design for 8+ years. It’s a fine career. But let me tell you what it actually involves so you can decide if you want it.

What Your Day Actually Looks Like

Not what you think. Not what the career guides promise. Here’s the reality:

Actual designing: 12-15 hours per week
Explaining why your designs are correct: 8-10 hours per week
Redoing designs because someone’s opinion changed: 6-8 hours per week
Meetings about design that could have been an email: 5-7 hours per week
Justifying design decisions with “data” you have to go find: 4-6 hours per week
Implementing feedback from people who don’t understand design: 3-5 hours per week

Notice which number is smallest? The actual design work.

The job is maybe 30% creating solutions. The other 70% is convincing people your solutions are right, defending them from bad suggestions, and occasionally implementing bad suggestions because the person who made them has more political capital than you do.

The People Who Will Tell You You’re Wrong

The PM Who “Just Has a Feeling”

What they say: “I know the research says this, but I just have a feeling users will prefer the other way.”

What they mean: “I don’t have data, I don’t have reasoning, but I’m your stakeholder so my gut feeling overrides your professional judgment and your actual research with actual users.”

How often this happens: Weekly. Sometimes daily during design reviews.

You’ll present work backed by user interviews, usability testing, competitive analysis, and 8 years of experience. They’ll squint at it for 7 seconds and say “something feels off.” Then spend 25 minutes explaining their feeling while you take notes on feedback that contradicts everything you learned in actual research.

The worst part? Sometimes they’re right. Not because of their feeling, but because they happened to stumble onto an issue you missed. And then they’ll use that one time to validate their feelings forever.

The Founder Who Redesigns at 2am

The scenario: You’ve spent 3 weeks on a design. Research-backed. User-tested. Stakeholders approved it. Dev is about to start building.

2:47am: Slack notification.

“Hey, couldn’t sleep so I was playing around in Figma. What do you think of this?”

[Sends screenshot of your design but they’ve moved everything, changed the colors, removed the hierarchy, added a gradient background, and somehow made all the text the same size]

What they’re asking: “Can we use my version instead?”

What you’re thinking: “No, because you’ve broken 11 fundamental design principles and made it objectively harder to use.”

What you’ll say: “Interesting direction. Let me incorporate some of these ideas into the existing design system.”

What will happen: You’ll have a 90-minute call where you explain why gradients behind text reduce readability and they’ll explain that they just “feel like it needs more visual interest.”

You’ll compromise. The design will be worse than it was. It will ship. Nobody will mention this when reviewing what shipped.

The Engineer Who Says “Users Won’t Care”

Their philosophy: If it works functionally, design doesn’t matter.

Your reality: You’ll propose improving the onboarding flow because users are dropping off at step 3 of 5.

Engineer: “Users won’t care about that. If they want to use it, they’ll figure it out.”

You: “The data shows 40% of users abandoning at that exact step.”

Engineer: “That’s probably because they weren’t serious about using it anyway.”

You: “Or because the interface doesn’t make it clear what to do next?”

Engineer: “I think you’re overthinking this.”

(The engineer has never talked to a user. The engineer will never talk to a user. The engineer’s entire understanding of “users” is themselves, using the product, while knowing exactly how it works because they built it.)

The Stakeholder With “One Small Change”

The meeting: Design review with 6 stakeholders. You’re presenting the final design.

Stakeholder #4 (who has been silent for 45 minutes): “This looks great. Just one small change – can we make the header section more prominent?”

You: “Sure, how much more prominent?”

Stakeholder #4: “Not sure, just… more.”

What “just one small change” becomes:

• 2 hours trying to interpret “more prominent”
• 3 different versions exploring prominence levels
• Another meeting to review the options
• Different stakeholder saying the original was fine
• Stakeholder #4 saying “actually, can we try making it less prominent?”
• You, questioning your career choices

(The “small change” took 6.5 hours total. They picked the original version. Nobody mentioned this took a week.)

The Marketing Team Who Changes Copy After Design

The sequence:

Week 1: Marketing sends final copy for the landing page. You design around it.
Week 2: Design approved. Heading to dev.
Week 3: Marketing: “Quick change – can you swap out the headline?”
You: “The new headline is 40% longer. It breaks the layout.”
Marketing: “Can you just make the text smaller?”
You: “That reduces readability below acceptable levels.”
Marketing: “Can you make the container bigger?”
You: “Then the visual hierarchy breaks.”
Marketing: “Can you redesign it to accommodate the new copy?”
You: “That’s not a quick change. That’s redesigning the section.”
Marketing: “Oh, we need it by Thursday though.”

(You redesign it. It takes 8 hours. The original headline was better. Everyone knows this. Nobody says it out loud.)

What Nobody Tells You About The Career

It’s not that the work is bad. Product design work is genuinely interesting. Solving user problems is satisfying. Seeing your work ship and actually help people is great.

But roughly 60% of the job is managing people who have opinions about design without understanding design.

And here’s the thing: they’re not stupid. They’re not malicious. They’re smart people who are good at their jobs. They’re just confident about design in a way they’d never be confident about, say, backend architecture or tax accounting.

Nobody tells the engineer how to structure the database. Nobody tells the lawyer how to write the contract. But everyone feels qualified to tell the designer that the button should be blue, not green, because their cousin said blue buttons convert better.

The Math You Should Know

Before you commit to this career, understand the economics:

Junior UX designer salary: $55K-75K
Time spent actually designing: ~35% of your hours
Effective hourly rate for design work: $28-38/hr (if you calculate only design time)
Effective hourly rate including all the other stuff: $50-70/hr (actual salary divided by all hours)

You’re being paid reasonably. But a significant portion of that pay is for managing opinions, not making design decisions.

Mid-level UX designer salary: $85K-120K
Time spent actually designing: ~25-30% (more seniority = more meetings)
Additional responsibilities: Mentoring juniors, sitting in on strategy, defending designs to executives

The more senior you get, the less you design. The more you manage, persuade, and translate between business needs and user needs. If you got into this career because you love designing, that’s the twist: success means doing less of it.

The Emotional Labor Nobody Mentions

You’ll spend substantial energy:

• Keeping your face neutral when someone suggests something terrible
• Explaining the same design principles 47 times to different people
• Watching your designs get slowly degraded by “small changes”
• Being diplomatic when you want to say “that’s a bad idea and here’s why”
• Celebrating compromises that made the product worse as “collaborative wins”

This is the actual job. If that sounds exhausting, it’s because it is. If that sounds manageable, then yeah, UX design might be a good career for you.

What Changed for Me

I stopped expecting design decisions to be made based on design expertise.

Sounds cynical. It’s actually freeing.

Once I accepted that design is inherently collaborative and that means incorporating input from people who don’t understand design, I stopped being frustrated when it happened. Started building better arguments. Started picking my battles. Started understanding that sometimes “make it pop” means “I don’t know how to articulate my concern but something feels off” – and my job is to figure out what they’re actually worried about.

Same way I learned that companies who ask “why do we need UX strategy” aren’t ready to hire designers. Same way I figured out that 17 stakeholders means nobody can actually make decisions.

Now when students ask “is UX design a good career,” I ask them different questions:

Can you explain the same concept 12 different ways?

Because you’ll need to. Different stakeholders understand different explanations. Some respond to user research. Some respond to business metrics. Some respond to “this is how Stripe does it.” You need all three in your toolkit.

If you can only explain design decisions one way (your way), you’ll be frustrated constantly.

Are you okay with compromise?

Pure design vision basically never ships. There’s always a technical constraint, a business requirement, a timeline pressure, a stakeholder opinion that shifts the design away from the ideal.

The shipped version is always a negotiation between perfect design and reality. If that feels like failure to you, this career will hurt.

If you can be proud of “pretty good considering the constraints,” you’ll be fine.

Can you let go of ego?

If you need credit, need recognition, need your vision to ship intact – this isn’t the career. Your work is always going to be collaborative, which means it’s always going to be compromised.

If you can be okay with that, it’s a good career.

Look

Is UX design a good career? Honestly? Yeah. For the right person.

The pay is decent ($70-140K depending on experience and location). The work is stable – every company needs UX/UI design work even if they don’t always respect it. The problems are interesting. When your designs actually help users, it feels meaningful.

But it’s not what the bootcamps sell you. It’s not 8 hours a day in Figma making beautiful interfaces. It’s 3 hours in Figma, 2 hours explaining your decisions, 2 hours in meetings, 1 hour implementing feedback you disagree with, and 1 hour wondering if you should have become a developer instead.

If that sounds tolerable, come join us. We need more designers who understand that the job is as much about people as it is about pixels.

If that sounds like hell, maybe look into development or data science or literally anything where people won’t confidently overrule your professional judgment based on their cousin’s opinion about button colors.

The work is fine. The people are exhausting. The combination is called “UX design.”

(Welcome to the career. The PMs are already waiting in Slack with feedback on your onboarding that you haven’t designed yet. They “just have a feeling” about how it should work.)