Do I Have To Constantly Strive For More In My UX Career? | by Briana Bui | Sep, 2023

A personal piece about climbing the ladder in tech and my journey to releasing myself from the corporate rat race.

It’s been a while since I’ve written here. In the last several months, I’ve been grinding away at work as a UX designer and also pursuing a few different things in my personal life. In the time that I haven’t actively written here, I’ve learned a lot and have a few experiences I’m hoping to share with you all in these upcoming blogs.

The first one I’m going to talk about is when I finally acknowledged my cycle of anxiety and its triggers as it relates to my job as a mid-level UX designer working towards a promotion to Senior.

*The experiences shared in this blog are a reflection of my personal outlook on my career journey and should not be interpreted as a representation of the work culture or practices of any specific company or organization.*

To backtrack, when I started my job as a mid-level UX designer, I encountered a huge learning curve breaking into tech, e-commerce specifically, and the overall change of pace. They say it can take anywhere from three to six months to actually get settled into a new job and company and I can attest to that.

I was battling all of the different learning curves alongside the expectations I put on myself and the expectations of the job. The first 6-months of the job was truly mentally brutal for me. Putting my blood, sweat, and tears into my day job.

When my six-month performance evaluation came up, I was thrilled to know that I was meeting expectations. I was relieved to know I wasn’t failing.

However, soon after my performance evaluation call — I couldn’t help but feel like an empty shell of a human. For those six months, I averaged 50-hour weeks, endured multiple large-scale projects getting put on me, inherited poorly half-done projects from past designers, got projects deprecated, survived a round of layoffs, and more.

All this effort to achieve “meeting expectations” …?

You might be reading this and thinking I’m ungrateful for my performance score…