Hey all - I’m a senior PD that ended up at a shitty company because of layoffs. I’ve been interviewing with companies and one company has asked me (after three positive rounds) to do a one hour “brainstorming session” on a real problem that the company has — completely unpaid. I sent them a polite email declining to move forward unless I was paid as an independent contractor or if I could have a completely abstract business prompt. Is this an over reaction on my part?#design #interviews #ui/ux
Let’s make this the norm
You did the right thing.
I would never
I’ve had plenty of design exercises in interviews that were related to the company. For example, when I interviewed at Figma they asked me to consider designing for flows related to the team. I’ve also worked at companies that issued these design prompts. The reality is that without having full context of a project’s constraints and stakeholders, none of these interview exercises are even viable or make it to production. If you don’t do them, someone else will still do the exercises because they want the position more. You’re more than welcome to enforce your own boundaries and how you want to use your time, but it’s not as nefarious as you make it seem.
Yes but this was a problem that came directly from a customer complaint and would most likely make it onto the roadmap. I’m happy to do a solved problem, theoretical flow or improvements but direct work is no go for me and I plan on enforcing thise boundaries. A place that inflexible in the interview process isn’t somewhere I’d like to work at. I also don’t want to work at a stressful high growth startup like Figma again as I find the culture in these orgs stifyling. To each their own
Doing “work” as part of an interview depends on the design maturity of the company. If they already have a mature design org, you’re not actually going to be solving for any problems for them. If there’s already a full team of designers thinking about solving this problem full time, you probably aren’t genius enough to come up with a realistic solution for them in 30 minutes with no context. Figma, for example, is a company I consider having a mature design org. I have also only ever interviewed and worked for companies with mature design orgs. But doing this for small startups with no designers is a big no - they don’t already have design explorations they tried, and should not be interviewing like bigger companies with mature design orgs, and they should not have design exercises in their hiring process.
Your reaction is absolutely valid! It’s exhausting with these interview processes where you go through several rounds, and challenges only to get an automated reject email with no feedback. It’s great you are setting your boundaries, you are ware of the company/values that aligns with your goals. You did the right thing. I would have done the EXACT same. So tired of the broken process.
I just had an interview with a brainstorm and at the end of it I felt like Wait, I don’t effing work here. It took up a lot of thinking and required heavy domain knowledge. I don’t think it’s very productive in an interview.
even if it’s paid, it’s going to be like $100 max an hour. that actually makes me feel worse.
Lol one no name startup offered me $200 to redesign their popups and I was like lol no
3 positive rounds mean they already invested in you, their time and effort, so it's a fair deal. If someone asks to do homework upfront at the very beginning, then it's a firm NO
3 45 minute interviews doesn’t really sound like an “investment” sorry
There’s a difference between “doing free work” and “design something we are familiar with” I’ve done lots of design challenges. At Google we just do whiteboard for generic prompts. At other places I’ve done some challenges based on the product, but it’s stuff like “how would you design an onboarding flow for this product” or something similar. Basically it has already been solved. Other times it has been brainstorm sessions of a problem they’re encountering, but it’s all low stakes. The reality of it is that the 1 hr of time you spend on a live challenge is not enough time to do anything meaningful. Is there a % chance that your stuff is amazing and they use it eventually? Maybe, but if you can do that in 1 hour then you are really, really good, so maybe you really should get paid for it. In fact, if you’re that good at solving on the spot, just open up your own agency and be richer than all of us 9-5ers. In the end it does not matter to me for live challenges. 50% of that is spent asking questions and context anyways. A 1 hour “brainstorm session” is not actual work in my opinion. Maybe 20-25 minutes of that is actual design work that is usable? And at very low fidelity most likely. Designers tend to oversell themselves and think their work is all amazing, but chances that whatever you come up with is actually novel in that amount of time is infinitesimally small. They most likely already thought of your solution, and they just want to see how you reason through it. In my opinion I think you overreacted, but your boundaries are your own to set. Just think about the amount of times in your career where you encountered something brand new to you and how much you accomplished in an hour. On the flip side, a 4-8 hour take home project on their product? Hard pass. Even if it wasn’t on their product I wouldn’t do it.
I actually agree with you on your points HOWEVER this was a smaller startup looking to hire a second designer. On top of that, I had requested that they change the prompt to something tangential or a solved problem like you described. Their inability to ADJUST to my ask shows me that the startup is very immature UX-wise and the hirijg manager is somewhat inflexible. So if you can understand — it is not the challengr itself but the inflexiblity to CHANGE the challenge or ADJUST which turned me off. So I disagree with you.
Disagree with what part? That you overreacted? Clearly if they’re hiring their 2nd UXer they would be low design maturity (whatever that means to you. Design maturity is overrated to me). And unless you need accommodations, I have never known a company to be flexible with things like design challenges and prompts. They need to be generally standardized across candidates, and if they didn’t do it from the get-go, changing it makes comparing candidates difficult. I get that you didn’t like their inflexibility. That is perfectly valid — but your original post didn’t say that. It positions design challenges based on company products as the problem… which again, I don’t think it is. Even at the start up level, I don’t feel a 1 hour design challenge is an issue.
I too no longer participate in unpaid design exercises
Me either. My time is valuable and I won't give a company free work when there's a high chance they will ghost me without feedback.