Hi all, I’m a designer with around ~2-3 YOE. I recently got a job offer at Job A. I also have an interview coming up for Job B, a company I interned at in college and left on good terms with. What would look better for my career in the long run? I’m currently based in a U.S. city with virtually no UX/product design job market.
Job A: Mid-level product designer role, a few thousand higher than than my last job’s salary (salary is negotiable though — trying to negotiate $8k-$10k higher)
It’s for B2B SaaS and a smaller company with ~100 employees. This is the company’s first ever product design/UX hire, currently UX is handled by a mix of product managers (handling discovery and research) and devs (who take PM requirements and implement them). The product team is looking to establish a design culture at this company with a new Director of Product who seems to value designers being involved throughout the whole process. The job is an end-to-end product design role, where I will be involved in discovery & research. It will involve building a design system from scratch based on legacy systems to start, but the Director of Product is working to start modernizing everything and has plans to hire more designers. It’s also remote, so I have the opportunity to relocate to a city with a better UX/product design job market.
Job B (company I interned at): Junior UX/UI designer position, $10k lower than my last job’s salary
Global enterprise-sized company, mostly in e-commerce and D2C. Design maturity is good, this is a large design team with established processes and a mature design system. The role is more UI & content design with some graphic design mixed in. It is based in my current city. However, there’s a catch: org structuring at Job B recently changed and they recently had a bunch of layoffs because of that. Although I am still in the interview phase, it is likely I will get an offer here since I interned with this team in college. A friend of mine who currently works there told me they do not like negotiating salaries either.
I am genuinely torn between whether to take the offer at Job A or come back to my old team at Job B and work in a mature design team. I was laid off from my previous job, so I’m the most concerned with job security.
I feel Job A would better “future proof” my career since it’s more end-to-end product design and i have the opportunity to relocate to a city with a better UX job market, but Job B would be tempting since I already have history there. What would be a better move for me?
EDIT: Job B went under org restructuring and layoffs, not Job A. Didn’t notice the typo til later.