The UX Research Reckoning is Here
I worked at Google as an engineer, but I also went to design school. The vast majority of my friends are from art&#x2F;design school, and my family ran a business in the visual arts. This is to say I have familiarity in and out of the tech space.<p>The problem is the rise of Career Designers™ as opposed student of the arts. The current pipeline is dominated by candidates who realize there are few careers for liberal arts students paying six-figures  and also self-aware enough to know they don&#x27;t enjoy math&#x2F;programming&#x2F;excel (although many cashcow masters provide OPT when they don&#x27;t even any math or even the rigor of a respectable MBA). Google has a propensity to hire people who hold master degrees specifically in UI&#x2F;UX, but I&#x27;ve found only a small fraction (maybe 1&#x2F;10, and definitely much lower than 25%) who has any aesthetic intuition. I&#x27;ve seen their non-portfolio work, such as their photography and clothing choices. The average teenager on social media probably have more artistic sensibilities than people who are supposed to be the top-tier designers. Obviously this is subjective and also a proxy metric, but I&#x27;d like to believe the ability to compose whether it&#x27;s photos, interior design, or clothing is strongly correlated to the ability to design a website. Or even just having an appreciation of cinema that isn&#x27;t Marvel. We end up with people who follow systematic procedure taught in a masters in UI&#x2F;UX that leads to lots of and lots of overly complicated design patterns that make sense intellectually and in isolation, but will never arrive at something that is hollistically cohesively and usable like Craigslists.<p>Google has grown into a corporation and select for career oriented students who are studious high achievers who focuses on practical matters rather than frivolous things. Maybe that algorithm works well for programmers, where in math&#x2F;programmer there is a yes&#x2F;no, but even then school can&#x27;t indicate who has good intuition about design. I mean the author of Vue is a design major, not computer science.<p>The people who live and breath art aren&#x27;t being hired by tech companies to be designers, especially the large ones. They don&#x27;t fit the corporate status quo, but then again they tend to be independently wealthy and never had to treat academia as a means of procuring a job anyways. At least for hackers &#x2F; cybersecurity &#x2F; introverted programmers types, tech companies have done a good job at assimilating people were in social outcasts in early decades. The design orgs feels much more political and feels like a grown-up version of a high school popularity contest. Google&#x27;s recruitment process of emphasizing academic prestige (school, grades, advanced degrees) may work well for other areas, but it&#x27;s filtering out the best candidates, and selecting for people who are frankly mediocre.<p>In the early days of Google, when Google was a pioneer in design, design was lead by Marissa Meyer, an engineer who had a knack for design. It she an artist? Maybe not, but Google was a pioneer in website design and it&#x27;s at least in part attributable to her. Engineers who have design sensibilities are probably better for designing websites &#x2F; apps than career-designers.<p>So that&#x27;s UI designers. UX Researchers are supposed to be scientific and minor statisticians. They&#x27;re supposed to glean test hypothesis and make unbiased judgements from a representative sample of the population. The UX Researchers I&#x27;ve worked with were some of the most unscientific and non-quantitative people I&#x27;ve worked in my 10+ professional years. The math stops at basic percentages. I observed some of these surveys and user studies where they prime candidates and ask leading questions towards answers they&#x27;ve pre-assumed, rather than actually listening to the user. That&#x27;s why there is such a huge and growing disconnect between Google products&#x27; usability and the user. 
Most of the people who advance in this org are unsurprisingly great at talking.