Experience required (But please don’t use it)
Notes on the curious way companies interview designers vs how they treat them.
There’s something bizarre about how companies think about design experience. They’ll spend three months interviewing someone about every product that failed, every feature that bombed, every painful lesson they’ve learned. But the moment that person tries to prevent the exact same mistakes at their new job? Suddenly they’re “resistant to change,” like their experience is more curse than qualification.
This pattern shows up in my inbox so often it’s almost become a dark joke. Designers sharing interview questions that read like confessionals — tell us about your biggest failures, show us how you learned from them, prove you’ve seen enough things break to stop the breaking. The companies lean in, hungry for stories about metrics that tanked and users who walked away. They want someone who’s lived through the mistakes so they don’t have to.
But knowledge isn’t neat like that. It doesn’t sit quietly in the corner until someone asks for it. When you’ve watched the same approach fail three times before, you can’t just smile and nod while your new team builds it again. When you know exactly why users hate a feature, that understanding doesn’t disappear just because this company thinks they’re different.
The stories blur together after a while. A designer who spent years fixing broken checkout flows watches their new team deploy every pattern they just finished proving doesn’t work. Someone who built social features at three different companies sits through meetings about “revolutionary” new approaches that are carbon copies of things that drove users away last year. Their carefully documented insights sit unread while the cycle starts again.
What gets me isn’t the waste — though watching companies ignore expertise they spent months searching for is its own kind of absurd. It’s the slow transformation of experience from asset to liability. Those “strong opinions” they begged for in interviews become warnings in performance reviews. The “ability to challenge assumptions” they wanted turns into “difficulty aligning with priorities.” Your past successes become proof you’re “stuck in old patterns.”
It reminds me of those optical illusions where two people see completely different things in the same image. Companies stare at design experience and see two opposing realities: in interviews, it’s precious wisdom they desperately need; in practice, it’s an inconvenient reminder of paths they’d rather not examine. Both views exist simultaneously, creating this strange space where designers are both valued for their knowledge and punished for applying it.
The job listings tell one story: “Looking for strong opinions backed by experience.” “Must have solved complex problems before.” “Show us how past failures shaped your approach.” They want the safety of having someone who’s seen it all before. But seeing isn’t the same as preventing, and prevention requires something companies seem increasingly unwilling to offer: the ability to actually use what you’ve learned.
Messages pile up in my inbox from designers caught in this loop. Each one a variation on the same theme — the slow dawning realisation that their role isn’t to prevent familiar failures, but to be present while they happen again. Their expertise becomes a kind of curse, perfect clarity about what’s about to go wrong coupled with the understanding that pointing it out will only make things worse.
The whole thing is simpler than we pretend. Companies know exactly how to find experienced designers. They’ve perfected the art of interviewing for it, hunting for it, collecting stories of past failures and hard-won victories. What they haven’t figured out, or maybe never wanted to figure out, is what to do with that experience once it’s in the building. It’s as if they want the comfort of having someone who’s seen it all before, without the discomfort of listening when they tell you what they’ve seen.
When I post about these patterns, my inbox fills with messages saying “are you sitting on my shoulder?” It would be validating if it wasn’t so depressing — all these designers recognising their own story in each other’s struggles. Each one thinking they were alone until they realised we’re all watching the same play with different actors.
The most painful part might be how unnecessary it all is. All this expertise, all these lessons learned the hard way, all this potential to make better products — just sitting there, carefully documented but largely ignored. It’s a quiet sort of irony, watching companies perfect the art of finding experience while simultaneously perfecting the art of ignoring it. Like they’ve decided the real value isn’t in preventing mistakes, but in having someone qualified to watch them happen.
Hi, I’m Mindaugas.
I’ve spent the past decade working with designers from companies like Netflix, Google, Amazon, Intercom, and OpenAI. At On Deck, I built the Design Fellowship, and at InVision, I created design communities on a global scale. Before this, I was a design recruiter which enabled me to help 100’s of designers land their dream jobs.
Through thousands of conversations, I’ve helped designers navigate career transitions, land roles they didn’t think possible, get promotions, and understand what’s happening in the market.
Now, I’m building Coho, a private network for designers to have the kinds of conversations that change careers. Small, focused groups meet every two weeks to tackle challenges, exchange insights, and grow together.
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