Things I Wish I’d Known Earlier in My Career

We often focus on the latest techniques and tooling, trying to optimize our workflows and processes. However, in the end, every single person has their own goals and ambitions, and too often our individual goals are left far behind the company goals and the product development roadmap.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been receiving a few emails asking about the right ways to negotiate salary, get promoted and noticing red flags early. So I thought it might be a good idea to just write down a few suggestions that could be helpful for everyone. Hopefully, you'll find some useful advice in there.

1. Never Tell Your Salary Expectations First

Some recruiters and HR managers make good money by pushing down salaries or hiring experienced professional on "lower" positions. So be very careful and strategic when negotiating. If you are asked about your salary expectations, politely decline that question, and ask for an offer first.

Do your research up front. Explore what is a reasonable salary for your role, and for your level of experience in your region — with websites such as Glassdoor and similar sites.

If the HR manager insists on a ballpark figure, suggest the salary that’s at least 20% higher that what you are currently making, and a bit higher of what the company usually pays. This helps you account for inflation, gender gap and any other costs, but also leaves enough room to negotiate.

2. Pay Attention To Your Job Title

In many large companies, titles defines salary levels. Growing from one position into another can be difficult and time-consuming, and heavily depends on how attentive and caring your managers are.

Be very careful and strategic about the role that you apply for, and the role that you are given in the contract. There are significant differences between UX Designer and Senior UX Designer roles: this goes for your responsibilities and, most importantly, your salary levels.

3. You Can’t Have It All

We often want to have a lovely combination of ownership in our team, a decent salary with stock options, stability, good managers, good people and a good work-life-balance. It’s remarkably difficult to have it all. In a start-up environment, you might have a lot of ownership, but with it often could come a slightly chaotic environment with last-minute changes and mid-night fixes.

In large corporations, you would have a reasonable salary and stability, but you probably won’t feel like you make significant contributions to the product — you are likely to be working on small tiny adjustments, often not even knowing if your work will ever see the light of day.

Figure out what is important to you. Personally, I'd choose working with good people on a great product over salary and stock options any time of the day. The choice of company would be influenced by this very decision.

4. Keep Record of Your Achievements

We often think that if we just work hard enough, we will get noticed, and we will be promoted to senior positions, with the salary and responsibilities adjusted accordingly. Sometimes it happens, but more often than not it doesn’t. Managers change, companies evolve, teams get restructured, and as these changes are happening, you might not ever get to being promoted because everything is shifting all the time and with all the managers coming and leaving it's difficult to track whether it's time for your promotion or not.

Many companies have feedback loops ("one-to-one"s, 360 reviews etc.), where you get feedback from your team and from your managers a few times a year. This is a great opportunity to raise the question about your personal growth, and what you need to do to move to the next level. Use this opportunity in your favor.

Maintain an up-to-date record of your achievements, milestones, projects and learnings, workshops and trainings you’ve attended, articles you’ve written and talks you’ve given, your help with onboarding new employees, your contribution to weekly UX meetings etc. (a Google Doc would do). This will help you argue better during salary negotiations. You have to be proactive about your salary increase — you are unlikely to be noticed on your own, so make sure that your managers provide time and space for you to bring up your question about your career, personal growth, responsibilities and salary.

5. Pay Attention to Your Estimates

We often assume that we have around 8 working hours a day, and that we are actually working productively during that entire timeframe. That, however, doesn’t account for so many things, from routine emails and errands to sick days and urgent meetings.

When asked to estimate the amount of time you need to deliver, count on 6–6.5 productive working hours a day. Feel free to underpromise and overdeliver, but always include the cost of over-delivery in your estimates.

Always invest time into writing a detailed scope of work, explaining how you understood the problem, what your assumptions are, how you are planning to solve it, what it will require, when you need to get (timely) feedback and the timeline you can commit to.

Most importantly, make sure that everybody understands that you are estimating delivery for a fixed scope of work, and late changes will be expensive and might delay the delivery.

6. Test The Company During The Probation Period, Too

We often think about probation period being a test for employees, but you can also see it as an important test for the company, too. Watch out for red flags: do people leave for strange reasons? Are there any issues that keep showing up a lot? Are designers and developers listened to in the company? What are some of the recent changes that were implemented based on user’s feedback?

Engage in conversations about what the impact of work is, just to make sure that you don’t put your hard work and efforts into something that might not even be worth your energy. You are talented, skilled and hard-working, and there are plenty of good uses of your skills out there.

7. Think About Passive Income Early

When you are in your 20s, it’s easy to dismiss the notion of passive income. After all, you have all the time in the world to make your decisions later. But do think early about your passive income — the earlier you start investing into ETFs, or creating digital products, templates, books, the more you can accummulate over the years. That’s a valuable, and the most important investment of your time for the decades to come.

You don’t need much money to start building up your passive income. Even putting aside $100 a month will pay off long term. Also, find like-minded people and start cultivating your user base. Once you know what you like doing (e.g. landing pages), try to do as much as possible to make sure that when the topic comes up, your name, or the resources that you have created, come up along with it.

This requires visibility — writing, publishing, releasing, open-sourcing. Set aside a bit of time every week to invest into it — it’s worth every second of your time.

Wrapping Up

Of course everybody has their own experiences, so the things I've mentioned here might be not quite what you'd recommend, and might not align with your current situation. However, I strongly believe that many of these points will be important to consider or think about before switching companies, or confirming an offer or passing the probation period.