u/SucculentChineseRoo

Seemingly there's no escape from the chaos, I'm not in the anti-AI camp but there's more and more push in my own and my friends' companies to desperately try automate every skilled function to 10 .md skill files in a trench coat (claude agents).

The quality of everything is going in the absolute shitter with most of these trial practices but it's like nobody cares about it or can think 3 months ahead.

Everyone I'm talking to is severely demotivated, burnt out and fatigued and it honestly seems like a shit show all over.

Anyone works in any company that isn't like that and has a shred of sustainable practices or is it a nationwide phenomenon?

Hello, I'm an experienced UX designer and software engineer (11yoe), I was originally self taught but have since finished a Bachelor of Computer Science while working and I can do a really inexpensive Graduate Certificate of Design starting in August, it's 4 modules that could be pretty useful including formal UX, tangible design, communication design and leadership. I wonder if it's worth the stress juggling it on top of work to get some extra credentials on top of my CS degree to either improve employability or be considered for research masters if the market goes even worse and I need to make poverty research wages. Any thoughts?

Hello, I'm an experienced UX designer and software engineer (11yoe), I was originally self taught but have since finished a Bachelor of Computer Science while working and I can do a really inexpensive Graduate Certificate of Design starting in August, it's 4 modules that could be pretty useful including formal UX, tangible design, communication design and leadership. I wonder if it's worth the stress juggling it on top of work to get some extra credentials on top of my CS degree to either improve employability or be considered for research masters if the market goes even worse and I need to make poverty research wages. Any thoughts?

TLDR; all product planning structure is gone and I'm now reviewing features built by developers with 0 problem space and user thinking who review whatever AI generates for them.

​

Long:

The technical C-suite is shifting the engineering team setup into the stuff of nightmares, I basically turned from the UX/Product Lead person who would hear a customer issue, do quick research using our tools or some usability tests for large flows, and the create all of the designs, prototypes, and PRDs for the developers to work on.

​

Enter AI-pilling and LLMs, the developers are now fast (since I was looking after about 20), even though I've also sped up everything on my end, I have AI tooling to handle parts of research, surface data from the analytics to support or disprove hypotheses, I've built an AI-enhanced design system that allows me to put out prototypes quickly, and many specialist SKILL.md files that help review it, point out edge cases, and generate PRDs and tickets while establishing what's blocking what.

​

There has always been a certain delusion from the top up that an average developer sitting offshore can do all parts of the job perfectly well, hence the insane ratio I was already working with, even though that attempt has failed every time it's been tried, the leadership now is trialing a system where every software engineer comes up with their own features, "does research" (asking an LLM what to build), and then builds it. Essentially they're their own PM and Designer and a Dev.

​

The issue is, again, this is 20 people we're talking about working on severely overlapping features, with no product knowledge or plan (because we're also kinda getting rid of roadmap now).

​

My job is now a damage control operator, reviewing large terribly designed features built by AI and because I can't push back on the whole thing since it's built-built, asking to fix only the easy heuristic stuff.

​

Anybody else in lower UX maturity orgs seeing this? Obviously I'm looking for a way out but the market is hot garbage.

I'm a UX/product designer and software engineer, I'm the only "design" person in my entire org and I frequently have to also support marketing for example, every single time without fail I have to manually adjust layouts, create or find matching visuals and graphics, and sometimes create custom icons etc. While I have been able to utilise AI in some of UX and UI work as well as some software engineering I just don't see anything that can generate an editable graphic representation of what I need. Is there some secret product that's doing it?