Dear Junior UX designers: startup vs established company, which one suits you best?
As a product designer who has experience working at a startup and an established company in Silicon Valley, I’d like to share some thoughts comparing these two based on my personal experience and observations.
Here’re my background stories: the startup I worked for as a UI/UX design intern is Datrium, it’s a B2B startup that helps enterprises preserve and secure their data by providing unified cloud solutions to primary storage, backup, and disaster recovery. At the time I joined Datrium, there were about 200 employees in total. (Fun fact: Datrium was acquired by VMWare in July 2020, which made it become a “large established company” now).
On the other hand, the established company I’m working for now is RingCentral, a larger company with nearly 5000 employees globally, 2400 of them in the US. RingCentral offers cloud enterprise Unified Communications as a service (UCaaS), including cloud phone systems, SMS, team messaging, video conferencing, etc.
After I reflected on my experience working at a startup vs an established company, I visualized the comparison via this table from several aspects such as work culture, work-life balance, salary, etc. This table was created based on my own experience and observations. I’d say it’s generic and may not apply to every case.
Below are a few questions I get frequently from aspiring designers who are in a job search phase or trying to decide which company they should go to after receiving a couple of offers. Here’re my insights into those questions.
Q: How do I choose between a startup or an established company?
A: I’d say it depends on your goals and background at the current stage of your career. I’d recommend evaluating different options based on the dimensions you care about most.
For instance, I’d look into future coworkers/managers, project type (2B/2C/internal tools), company culture, compensation/benefits, work-life balance, work VISA policy (since I’m an international student on F1 VISA). You can prioritize or mix and match the above dimensions according to your own preference.
I’ve heard a lot from people who have been in the industry that the deciding factor of being happy at work is always the people you work with. Before making a final decision, reaching out to future coworkers, asking them what they feel about working there, or even reading Glassdoor reviews would definitely get you some useful insights.
If you feel the people/work culture/compensation between the two options that you’re considering are similar, and you’re a new grad without any prior industry experience, I’d definitely recommend going with an established company. As a junior designer, receiving systematic training and mentorship in your early career could be very beneficial to your career growth. On the other hand, if you’re a new grad who already has a couple of years of work experience and who likes wearing multiple hats from UX research to visual design, taking ownership of a product from head-to-toe, then I’d say you can consider working for a startup.
Q: How do I know if I’ll like working at startups/established companies?
A: My answer is — you never know until you get your feet wet. In 2019, before I joined Datrium as a UX/UI intern, I had some false expectations toward the internship. I was under the impression that working at a startup could be chaotic, long work hours, stressful, fewer swags and benefits. And it turned out that it wasn’t the case. Datrium was a mature startup that raised 60M in series D funding and made revenue steadily. As you can imagine, this startup experience was way better than I had expected. Over the summer, I accomplished a project independently with mentorship along the way and got myself another highlight project on my portfolio which is beneficial to my future job search.
This experience enlightened me that I’m more interested in B2C than B2B and I didn’t know this until I worked on a project in the B2B field. It also made me want to look for UX design opportunities at established companies in my early career. I figured as a junior designer without too much industry experience, I still wanted to grow in a structured UX team and receive systematic training/mentorship at least the first couple of years after I graduate from school.
My advice to junior designers is that — be open-minded and be brave to try out different possibilities in your early career. Doing a couple of internships in different product/company settings before getting into the industry full-time also helps a lot. It does not necessarily mean that you won’t be able to get into established companies if you start your career at startups, vice versa. I’ve seen those people who are so obsessed with certain brand names and feel anxious and self-doubting about not being at the place he/she was hoping for, which might even hinder their opportunities to grow and learn in the future.
To me, each experience, no matter good or bad, is precious learning. Those experiences enabled me to know more about myself and picture my UX career path — what kind of a UX designer I am, what type of companies I’d like to look for in the future, what product field I’m more interested in, what work culture I like more, what kind of people I like to work with, etc. It’s like you gotta put some dots on a blank sheet of paper first, and after that, pick your favorite dots, connect them into your one-of-a-kind UX path.
Thanks for reading till here! Feel free to share your thoughts with me and drop comments below, or hit the clap button if you like this article. : )
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