u/Substantial-Spirit11

I attended Lerner’s Research Week, and my realizations were honestly very different from most of the LinkedIn posts I’ve been seeing.

A lot of people are optimistic about AI and the future of UXR, but many of them are not the ones actually getting affected by these shifts.

Big Tech companies broke that whole junior-to-senior level chain with the vendor pipelines that do not really set junior UXRs up for success. A lot of the time, it feels like: “You stay here and keep doing execution work while we hire more staff-level people and create more AI workflows that slowly eliminate the lower-level work.”

I talked to a lot of researchers, and overall, I got the vibe that a lot of Junior UXRs are just trying to survive, get a foot in the door, and stay afloat. No grounds for curiosity or questioning are left for them.

Mid-level researchers are like: “How are you even talking about skipping steps and moving up the ladder when it took us 3–5 years just to grow into those roles? Be patient!”

Senior UXRs are saying: “Stay optimistic, things will turn around, the companies will need us back. Learn AI, Learn quant work, be more strategic in your approach on how you can help the business better.”

The problem isn't a lack of creativity or a strategic approach; it is the widening gap between execution level work and strategy-level work, and the opportunities sitting on both ends. And I rarely see people address it properly. Constantine talked about this in his “K-shaped divide” article, and that was one of the few takes that actually resonated with me.

The fight is to become a trusted advisor on the team, to survive, and to have a voice, to have space to make mistakes and come back stronger. I am afraid of being stuck in the loop of perfecting my execution as execution gets commoditized. I am afraid of the pressure to be right and extremely resourceful all the time. I am afraid of being stuck as a vendor resource, ready to be kicked out, for longer than I ever wanted to be.

Being a UXR at every level is difficult and comes with its own challenges. I am not at all saying that senior people have it easy. What I am highlighting is the gap that was hard to jump, becoming even harder than ever before.