r/userexperience • u/Gandalf-and-Frodo • 9d ago
Senior Question With the UX market being so competitive, why haven't salaries been slashed?
With the UX market being so competitive, why haven't salaries been slashed?
I'm still seeing most senior positions go for $120,000 to $150,000. It seems like there's 4x more supply than demand.
Will salaries be slashed in the coming years?
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u/OlDikDik 9d ago
I don't think salaries will be slashed, but the number of mid-junior roles will decrease. Companies will likely look for more senior people who can handle more complex workload and rely on AI for more of the basic tasks.
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u/lungleg 9d ago
OP asked this question in multiple UX subs… what are you on about?
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u/tutankhamun7073 9d ago
It's rage bait I guess. And OP wants to be a corporate slave and wants the rest of us to be one too
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u/AltKite 8d ago
I don't think it's got more competitive, if anything, it's less competitive (POV as a hiring manager.)
With the amount of online courses around, there's a larger applicant pool, but that's not the same as a talent pool.
It's becoming harder to sort the wheat from the chaff. Now, when I find a great UX designer, I'm keener to close with them because I know I'll likely have to go through a dozen portfolio reviews and 5 full interviews before I find someone as good.
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u/ruizkennedystudio 6d ago
Good question! I think even with more people entering the field, the demand for top-notch UX talent is still strong. Companies are realizing how crucial design is to their success, so they’re willing to pay well for experienced professionals. It’s a competitive market, but quality always stands out!
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u/wintermute306 9d ago
I think that makes sense. to be honest. I'd see it more as a market correction.
It seems odd to me that senior UX employee would make 25-50k more than a senior marketing employee. I get that is apples and oranges but, the cold hard truth is marketing is a hell of a lot easier to connect to direct revenue than UX is. I'm not saying UX isn't worth as much as a marketing but easier to justify to c-suite when organisations are tightening belts.
Happy to be wrong here, just my opinion.
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u/artseathings 9d ago
Companies typically learn the hard way that bad ux equates to people not wanting to use your products no matter how you market them. It's actually not hard to measure ux if the company is testing right either.
Ie... 1 marketing campaign points to 2 different A/B tests on layouts and you see directly how those things perform and capture users.
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u/z0d14c 9d ago
That's wild to me. I'm an engineer... UXers are doing the novel work of designing what the actual product does and how it looks and feels. Might be "easier to connect" marketing to revenue but ya gotta look a little deeper than that.
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u/wintermute306 9d ago
I'm thinking purely business, by the numbers here, and I also don't agree with the sentiment it's just what I've seen over my career.
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u/MarcoVinicius 9d ago
I disagree. The problem is too many UX designers don’t use metrics that would clearly show the revenue value of their work or don’t push UX leadership to develop them.
Some UX designers have been too much of an “academic” mindset where they feel they don’t have to show the business impact of their work. This has changed and rightfully so. User impact is first but business impact is a close second.
I’ve been an UX designer for over a decade for large tech companies and for a large majority of my work I can point to the monetary value by connecting in the right metrics.
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u/baccus83 9d ago
This is it. If you can’t talk about the benefit of your work in terms of dollars and cents, you’re gonna have a real hard time getting leadership to take you seriously.
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u/wintermute306 9d ago
I mean, I kind of agree with you there. I was more suggesting that it is easier to connect campaign work to hard conversions through UTMs etc, where as improving a conversion journey is rarely happens in isolation to other changes within an organisation which could effect conversion rate.
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u/OKboomerKO 9d ago
Probably because companies still want good UX designers to apply.
But I will also add, 120k for a senior UX designer is low, so it’s not like they aren’t slashing some.