I got fired on my moving day. Not just any moving day—the day I was packing my 2.5-bedroom apartment in Colorado to drive across the country to Florida because my father had cancer and I needed to spend what time he had left with him. The founder knew this. They all knew. They didn't just know—they used it against me.

[But I'm getting ahead of myself - Let me tell you how I ended up here]

I was living in Northern Queens during the COVID-19 spike—a stone's throw from the most impacted area in New York City. After experiencing that trauma and holding out for two years, I moved to Denver with two freelance contracts in hand, seeking a fresh start. But by 2022, those contracts dwindled—I saw the contraction coming before the 2023 mass layoffs—and I was desperate for full-time work. I eventually landed a job at a company called Fi, a smart dog collar company. They reached out to me—I didn't apply. On the third call, the founder promised to hire a creative director from IDEO. The roster showed designers from prestigious NYC studios I recognized and respected. What I didn't know: the founder had just lost support from SoftBank, their primary backer, triggering the firing of the entire design team. I was hired as the only designer. Those designers on the roster were already gone. Away from home and desperate for stability, I took the position.

I became the entire design and creative department. I did all marketing materials and all product design, then was asked to hire designers and interview for the creative director who would be hired above me. I hired two designers, but once onboard, work wasn't being allocated to them. They sat idle. I reached out to designers from the old teams and learned this was a pattern—the entire design team had been fired, not just once, but past teams before them. Multiple cycles. The founder created a toxic work environment—the complete opposite of the light, fluffy pet brand Fi presented publicly. His investors were pressuring him to diversify and generate new revenue streams. In his mind, the core Fi app was complete. No more product innovation needed. He wanted marketing to make money, not product development. He micromanaged every decision. My opinion was never valued.

The break came over a feature request. Fi's app has a "Lost Dog Mode" for when someone's pet goes missing. He wanted me to add a flow that would solicit video testimonials from users immediately after they used it—asking panicked, traumatized pet owners to record marketing content right after losing their dog, maybe finding them, maybe not, maybe finding them dead. I tried to dissuade him, then suggested a time-based follow-up days later instead. He refused. From that point forward, I was quietly let go. He took me off product work and moved all the marketing to me while the two designers I'd hired sat idle. The disagreement happened at the beginning of summer 2023. By the end of summer, I'd lost months on marketing materials, knowing I was already done. Then they hired the creative director—right before they fired me. They kept one of the designers I'd hired, let the other go along with me.

Drawing toward the end of summer, I made it clear I was moving from Colorado to Florida because my father had cancer. I needed to be with my family. They flooded me with work, making it nearly impossible to pack and plan a cross-state move, or prepare for what came next—update my portfolio, resume. They knew they were firing me. They wanted to extract everything they could first. On my last day before the move—movers scheduled for the afternoon—they had me working until noon on social media banners. Right when I said I'd stop to pack and drive across the country, all my accounts froze. A Slack message from the founder: "Can I connect?"

He fired me from Portugal. On vacation. On a balcony. Then they blocked me from retrieving my design work. I had to lobby for weeks to get it back. On moving day. My father had cancer. That afternoon, my ex-girlfriend arrived from New York to help with the drive. I put on a blank face and we drove 12 hours through the night. It was one of the worst days of my life. Looking back, I started piecing things together. How did the founder find me in the first place? Why expedite hiring me? Why was he so comfortable burning me the way he did? And why did recruiters start reaching out about a month before I was fired—in a terrible job market where recruiters never reached out?

I'm convinced they knew I was being let go before I did. I suspect the same staffing firm was responsible for hiring the creative director. My substantial salary made room for that hire. I'm not telling you this for sympathy. I'm telling you because this is what twenty years in design and tech gets you. And I'm done pretending the system isn't broken.

[The Recruiting Dark Network]

Most recruiters have no tech background. They don't understand what it takes to be a designer or engineer. They have no real interest in the work of the people they're placing. Their currency is gossip and aesthetics, not substance. And they have enormous authority over who gets presented to hiring managers. Two weeks before I was fired, a company called Creative People reached out. No prior relationship, terrible job market—the timing was suspicious. The recruiter knew far more than you'd expect for casual outreach. Very adamant about helping me find a new role immediately. After I was fired, it became clear: she was staffing my replacement. Recruiters are coordinating behind the scenes—unregulated networks in Slack or Discord channels, trading on people's lives, making decisions based on gossip, sharing information about who's getting fired before it happens. A year and a half later, that same recruiter reached out again. I told her I was working hard, building my own businesses, studying AI. She said: Hard work doesn't matter.

Craft, capability, intelligence—none of that matters. This is their value system. In this tight job market, recruiters carry themselves like celebrities—more valuable than actual candidates because they're so sought after. Look at their websites: lifestyle brands with glamour shots and headshots like bad American Apparel ads. They get invited to major tech conferences while experienced engineers and designers don't. But the reality? If they're not placing candidates, their businesses are failing too. And they stand to take more significant losses in the future because they don't actually have the skills of the roles they're staffing for. Their job is highly automatable.

Now with so many laid off, the game has changed. Eight or nine times out of ten, recruiters try to place you at much lower salary bands than you deserve. They belittle your accomplishments, your background, your capabilities. They offer advice on how to sell yourself—really just making you easier to place at lower rates. They push the narrative that you've lost value because of AI and the bad market, projecting negative energy while acting like masters of the universe. If you're reading this and you've felt gaslit in the application process or interacting with recruiters, you're not alone. Take it from someone with twenty years experience: what's going on is not okay. But this won't last. Hard work and real intelligence will prevail. No one can define your path for you.

It's time to show teeth.

[I Genuinely Thought It Was Me]

For twenty years, I thought my failures were personal. I had imposter syndrome like most creative people do, but I also had this awareness that I was smarter than the people making decisions above me. That's a painful contradiction—doubting yourself while watching less capable people steer the ship. I'll be honest: I got in my own way sometimes. I always felt bigger than the roles I was hired into, even senior and director-level positions. The responsibilities afforded to me never felt like enough. But here's what I didn't see clearly until after the firing: the industry was reinforcing that feeling. Recruiters telling me I'm not valuable. Leadership treating design as ornamental. A system that doesn't respect the work, then makes you feel like it's your fault when you can't break through. My grandfather used to say, "I don't suffer fools well." I inherited that. And the industry is full of fools in charge. Through consulting work after the firing, I finally saw it: it's not me. It's the system. And the system has been broken from the start.

[The Aesthetic Game]

Here's what they don't tell you: in this industry, you are the product. Companies hire based on aesthetics and persona, not ability, intelligence, or creativity. British accents get the keys to the castle. Attractive people get opportunities. It's all theater, all for show. Research backs this up. A meta-analysis of 27 studies found that when two equally qualified candidates differ in accent, the candidate with the standard accent is typically hired. Ratings of social status—not competence—correlated with hiring decisions. This is aesthetic discrimination masquerading as talent evaluation. The modern age demands everyone sell themselves on social media. Personal branding is mandatory. This doesn't appeal to the really talented wallflower designer or engineer who just wants to build with their tools. The people actually creating the work fail because they stay behind the camera. Meanwhile, those who perform get ahead. Please—don't destroy the preciousness of people who just want to build things.

[The Bootcamp Flood]

Around year seven or eight of my career, design and coding bootcamps flooded the market. As tech got hot, these programs created pipelines—they had connections with senior tech stakeholders. Six months of training competing with years of experience. They introduced the cookie-cutter case study format that still dominates today. Like book reports. Basic login flows presented as groundbreaking achievements. Eight paragraphs, whiteboard photos, sticky notes, collaboration imagery. Theater masquerading as accomplishment. The bootcamp market grew from fewer than 20,000 participants in 2015 to 100,000 in 2021. Hiring managers report that more than 90% of portfolios are turned down for one thing: the linear design process. Cookie-cutter case studies that all read the same. Whether it's the rock star aesthetic or the bootcamp symbiote persona, the industry favors cookie-cutter over craft. This commoditization, this optics-driven hiring, has pushed out really talented people. People who dedicate their lives to the work lose opportunities to people who spent six months learning to perform.

[The Commoditization of Design]

Bootcamps commoditized talent. Then the work itself got commoditized. As designers posted portfolios online—sites like Dribbble, Behance—our work became reference libraries. Offshore designers could copy-cat established work without formal training. Platforms like TopTal enabled this at scale. I experienced it firsthand. I tested into TopTal's design network, then watched as I lost contracts to offshore designers who didn't have formal training but could replicate what they saw online. The work was being devalued in real time. Now AI has supercharged this. It can extract references and rapidly replicate design outputs. It's as if we discovered an entire new country of offshore talent that will work for even less than before. The ultimate commoditization.

[Design Is Not Valued]

I moved between jobs many times over the course of my career. The industry gaslit me into thinking it was my inadequacies that led me to constantly job-hop and leave positions. But it wasn't me. It was the industry being so broken, with such little respect for design, that staying became impossible. The crystallizing moment came at a product design studio. We were working on a major touchscreen kiosk redesign for a fast food client. As a manager, I had insight into the state of the business. We were about to lose this client entirely—a devastating event for the studio. For months, we sat idle. I was working with some of the best designers I'd ever worked with in my career. Watching really capable designers just sit on their hands. Demoralizing.

Then the head business officer came to our desks. We were more aware than others that we were losing our premier client. And they asked us to craft a Christmas card for their children. For the holidays. Because we didn't have anything else to do. That's when I realized: design is not valued. We were ornamental labor to be used for personal errands. Even premier design studios are just corporations that function like any company. They reward subordination, miss the spirit of design and true individuality. They declare themselves creative institutions but don't honor creativity the way you'd expect. I left shortly after. Despite all this, moving between so many companies exposed me to highly talented people. Through all the dysfunction, I learned. But what I built—my network—turned out to be far less valuable than I thought.

I built connections with designers and engineers, most of them highly talented. But they don't hold positions of power at their companies. They're not officers making meaningful decisions. They're clinging to their own jobs in this steep, cold market. When networking matters more than skill and effort, what have I actually built? A house with a glass ceiling and a floor of straw.

[What I've Learned]

After twenty years, I've learned six things.

1. The system is broken, not you. If you're a young emerging designer, you need to hear this. Don't internalize the gaslighting. When you're passed over, belittled, or made to feel inadequate, it's not because you lack talent. It's because the system favors aesthetics, connections, and subordination over craft.

2. Learn to sell yourself. Marketing yourself matters almost more than your creative output in this broken system. I wish it weren't true, but performance gets rewarded while real builders stay behind the camera. Understand the game you're playing.

3. Building for yourself, is the only path for growth. I've never extracted as much reward from any company project across my lengthy career as I have from my own work. When I hit patches of discomfort and uncertainty, I return to building for myself—and those become the most rewarding periods of my career.

4. Family is everything. Despite the pain of this experience, being with my family—taking care of my father—was where I was meant to be. Family is the most important thing in the world. This was a gift in disguise. No monetary value could match this time.

5. Being forced to go independent taught me agency. The industry never afforded me stability or benefits, forced me into consulting and contracting. But that became my training ground. I learned to be my own entity, to exert agency, to become a company of one. Now with AI tools, I can actually follow through on my ideas. The industry's cruelty became preparation.

6. For young up and coming designers and engineers - forget the old advice. Don't join big companies to "learn" and pay your dues. That trap leads nowhere in this broken system. Become a solopreneur. Believe in yourself. Build your own skill set with the unlimited resources available now. Use AI and new tools. Channel your youthful energy and creativity into building your own business. Don't get stuck in the old world trap.

[THE COST]

There's one more thing I need to say. I've been kept away from someone I love. It's been over two years. We find ways to see each other, but I can't be with them. There's a toll when your entire life direction is called into question. When your value is questioned. When opportunities that were once abundant disappear. When you're forced to rely on your parents and family for support in ways you never expected at your age. When you can't get back to the person you love so dearly. It's maddening. Anxiety-inducing. I've been brought to lows I never expected. Dark moments where hope felt impossible. Times I questioned everything. But I did the work on myself. I pulled back from that edge. I kept fighting. I'm not a religious person, but I found a way to be faithful—to have faith in myself and this process. I believe I can design my future. I have the power. Everything that's happened is for a reason. This is the human cost underneath everything. Not just career lost. Not just time stolen. Love lost. The real devastation.

[THE EMERGENCE]

For twenty years, I searched for where I belonged. I didn't find it in the premier design studios that valued subordination over craft. I didn't find it in the startups that fired entire teams in cycles. I didn't find it working for a founder who fired me from his vacation balcony while my father was dying. But through all that strife—the gaslighting, the exploitation, the forced consulting, the dark lows—I was being armed. Twenty years gave me capability. It gave me awareness of my own agency. It taught me to become a company of one. Now AI has arrived. Everything shifts. The industry that tried to commoditize and devalue me has handed me the tools to bypass them entirely. AI democratizes building and shipping. Individual builders become more valuable, not less. The leaders of big studios who never respected the work? Their entire business model is threatened. Power is shifting to the makers.

The gap from designer to solo-preneur is smaller than people think. I'm at the very last stages of convincing myself that I don't need the world. I can do this on my own. When I was about to leave New York, I had a moment of clarity. A lucid thought: you have to go do this, and getting back home will be the fight of your life. I never expected that thought to be so accurate. I've been forced into the fight of my life. Despite everything—maybe because of everything—I believe I can design my way out of it. The old system is crumbling. Death to the old guard. Craft-focused people are about to emerge. The builders will rise. Showing teeth.

[And I'll be one of them]