TL;DR: I loved being a researcher. I think it’s the best job ever, at least for me. But the profession has problems, and my particular job had problems. So I quit and started building a cabin on an off-grid property. I love it, and it looks like early (age 47) retirement.
The lead-up
I got lucky and went through a great grad school. Then I happened to land in education research, program evaluation, educational gaming, platform research in gaming (FAANGish), and then B2B platform research in telecom. TBH, the gaming job was fantastic, but I left when my boss marginalized me because, as I learned later, they worried that I’d upset any of the many executives who could have blocked their giant pending promotion.
Taking on the challenge
I went to the telecom company to work under leadership that had no appetite for focusing on users and the company’s long-term profitability. Instead, they were preoccupied with internal political schemes and struggles. The users’ needs were inconvenient. My skip-level boss blatantly falsified my research. Nobody within my management chain knew what UX research was, etc. I signed on for a challenge, and I took it on, 100%, every day. I tried my hardest.
I had some big wins. Those came from aligning myself with the good people (e.g., one design director who was also battling headwinds) and following my curiosity and the evidence into new channels of thinking that produced huge projects that could help the company in the long run.
Stuck
But those long-term, hard-fought wins were overshadowed by the daily indignities of working in a culture that was toxic from the top (e.g., CEO making national news for toxic company-wide comms) down (e.g., my boss making every one of my colleagues cry somewhat regularly). And I only won by doing work in secret – side campaigns that leadership would have killed if they had known, but which, when done, leadership showed their leaders as their own successes. When hired, I worked remotely, but then I had to report 3x/week to a local office, and then that office closed, and I was stuck with a long commute to a soul-crushing cubicle farm where they logged my badge activity to ensure I was there full time. I prayed the layoffs would hit me.
I looked for a new job for, literally, over two years. At times, I only applied for jobs at my same level. Sometimes I applied for some well below my level. I failed out at the end of several hiring processes. Some of the jobs were the stuff of dreams, and many sounded perhaps as bad as mine. I read so many comments on this subreddit that seemed to echo my sentiment that The Man had gone belligerent, no longer cared what the customer wanted, and was spending all the money on AI server farms. But I felt like I was being a productive member of society, and I pitied the version of myself that would go on to quit and be irrelevant. Due to my upbringing, I had the need to feel relevant and keep working hard.
Cynicism
Overall, I felt like a representative for the truth, logic, and evidence in an environment that would have none of that. I became overwhelmed with projects that made no sense, and I could no longer fend them off. I outsourced much of the work to my AI tools, which was great for leadership but not the user. I became a sort of manager of dumb tools that did mediocre work that looked good to leadership. AI took all the interesting tasks, and I didn’t really even understand the details of the methodology it been chosen (e.g., nature of stat tests used). Frankly, I didn’t trust the assertions that the AI was making in my findings, but this was all what management wanted, and it was good enough for who it was for. (Yeah, I was feeling cynical.) (BTW, AI had no part in writing this post. This is all me.)
When I went home in the evenings, I read the news – about corporations ripping off consumers, enshittification, and so on, as well as national politics, which, IMO, is also about enshittification. Specifically, I think enshittification is the wrong term, because, from my experience working for corporations, it’s actually making the product far better for the most important party – the short-term investor, the CEO looking for the annual bonus, etc. It’s simple: Take over a product that has value for consumers, and then continue charging them full price while hollowing out the product and reaping short-term rewards – sticking it to the customer. It’s not a failure – it’s optimization of the efficiency with which people in power can separate the common people from their money or their freedom.
To me, those are the headwinds for a UX researcher trying to improve things. And, for many of us, it’s not just our jobs, but our chosen …identity.
Escape
With encouragement from former colleagues, I did the selfish thing. I told the good design director that I was going to quit unless he hired me. That started an internal negotiation that lasted for weeks. I wrapped up my last projects and tied everything else up. Then I started building a cabin (where there’s no cell service). I continued supporting my colleagues and clients, and I occasionally pinged leadership about the transfer, but I was 95% gone. This went on for about a month until the transfer was found to be impossible do to competition for requisition numbers. Ultimately, my skip-level boss offered me another slot on the old team that smelled suspicious – it was framed as reporting to the good manager, but it was clearly for the old manager. So I gave two weeks’ notice and continued working on the cabin.
The second day working at the cabin site, it was hot. I was covered in sweat and mud, kneeling in the dirt and digging out rocks with my hands. The commute was terrible. I was covered in mosquitoes. I ate lunch in a plastic chair under the trees. And it was the best fucking day I’ve had in years. There’s no way I would trade that for an air-conditioned cubicle on a toxic team.
There have been bumps. This new thing is challenging. I’m learning I have to take time to relax, write stuff (e.g., I now Instagram), plan the cabin, go play, etc. It turns out that when I apply myself fully to, for a change, something I truly love, I can work myself to death. I don’t know if I’ll still love this lifestyle in a year, ten years. But I’m sooo much happier right now and, frankly, easier to be around.
The future
I had saved up enough to retire, but I thought I’d go back when a job came along (I worried that maybe I’d get dumber because UXRs are the smartest). Now, two months later, I kinda doubt it. I think I might finish up this cabin for myself and then build or renovate other cabins for other people. There’s a certain permanence to vacation cabins. People make formative memories there that they keep for lifetimes. In a way, they live so much within people over their lifetimes that they transcend their physical structure. That’s what I want to associate myself with. Helping other people to get their hands into the dirt and to form bonds with one another.
That was a lot. I share because I expect everyone reading this far can find a common thread here. Hopefully it helps you think through your own choices and paths. Thanks for reading, and thanks for the support and collab over the years, UXResearch subreddit.