IC or Manager, laid off twice, prototyping with AI

Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.

Fabricio Teixeira
UX Collective

“You are Jean-Claude Van Damme. You’re straddling two 18-wheelers careening through space while doing the splits. It’s very difficult, your groin hurts, and you could really use a strawberry Pop-tart…

Here’s the question that has brought on all the pain and Pop-tart cravings: “Do I continue the path of individual contributor or turn towards management?”

As designers, this is a decision that we all need to face eventually. As soon as we become competent in our craft, we start to realize that we can’t straddle the gap forever.”

The split decision: IC or manager?
By Trip Carroll

Editor picks

The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.

Make me think

  • We did all this discovery… now how do we decide?
    “The more discovery they do, the more ideas they get. The ideas, the interviews, the stories, the pain points — they all start to pile up. That’s where the problem comes in. Now the PM has a giant portfolio of ideas. But the team can only build one thing at a time. How do they decide on the one thing to do next?”
  • Are AI assistants making us worse programmers?
    “In programming, high-level languages many times abstract the complexity away from you — something developers working with JavaScript, Python, Java, etc, know well. It seems clear that AI assistants introduce a new human-machine interface — natural language. Is that bad?”
  • Don’t forget to localize your icons
    “Localizing your app, web app, or website is more than just running all your text through Google Translate and hoping for the best. Creating effective, trustworthy communication with language communities means doing the work to make sure your content meets them where they are.”

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