Pay designers more: the good argument

Who should decide our value?

With the book wrapping up (September 2024 release), it’s time to dig in on a perennial topic: how can designers get paid more?

The funny thing about asking to be paid more is it assumes someone else in your organization should be paid less. The easy, but improbable, way to get paid more is to find someone on your team who will take a salary cut and give it to you. Go ask around. I’ll wait here. Any luck? I didn’t think so. But if it worked, Venmo me my cut please.

The truth is everyone wants to be paid more. Even wealthy executives and shareholders spend more time thinking about increasing profits rather than how to give cash away (to their moral peril). Whether it’s the CEO or CFO, someone in your organization has a spreadsheet that carves up the money pie and they have every incentive to cut the slices as thin as possible. Profit sharing makes great sense to me, as then everyone shares more of the wins, but it’s rare because people are often lazy and selfish and I can’t fix that in this little post.

Designers often complain about having to justify their value or prove their ROI, but I can tell you everyone has to justify their value, at least now and then. If you’ve never done it I can promise someone you work for has done it on your behalf. You may be too junior to have seen it, but if you are senior enough and stick around awhile, cutting entire teams and job functions is something you will see discussed from time to time. For example, before I left Microsoft, ~20% of engineering team jobs were in QA/testing roles, but they soon eliminated the entire job function. Poof! It happens.

I don’t share this to scare you: your job is probably very safe (if not, stop reading this stupid post and get back to work!), but open your eyes as to why that is. Everyone should have a clear sense of the real reasons why they are paid, but many don’t. We choose careers for our own reasons and often confuse our motivations with the financial value our employers are paying us to provide, which are likely very different. We do this at our peril.

The designer $$$ mismatch

Organizations pay us for their values, not ours.

Typical designer values:

• Quality

• Usability

• Creativity

Typical organization values:

• Efficiency

• Profitability

• Compliance

Do you see the big problem here?

It’s possible for designer Jill Shmoe to say “I’m doing great work but no one rewards me!” and for executives to say “why is that designer so inefficient and random?” and for them both to be right in their own value systems. The problem is the values of the organization always win. Why? The organization is paying your salary and not the other way around. If you will pay executives their salaries I promise they’ll come around to your sensibilities real fast.

The bad argument

A good argument is based on the listener’s values. It is crafted to be effective based on what the listener knows and cares about. A bad argument is based on what you know and what you care about.

The bad argument designers use for better pay is something like this:

”I came up with the amazing ideas that solve customer problems and make the product beautiful. Without me engineers and marketers would have clunky and ugly ideas to work with. Pay me more.”

This might be true, but it is a bad argument because it argues on design values. Which almost zero organizational leaders have.

Those leaders might know that those “better” ideas might cost more than they earn profit. Many profitable business have zero designers as there are clear reasons why bad design makes money. We have to acknowledge as designers than in many organizations our work will never be as valuable as we want it to be. And this is OK. Our salaries in part pay us for this. Ask everyone you work with, especially in other roles, and you’ll discover they often feel undervalued too.

If we want our organization to change its values, we have to persuade leaders to do it. It can be done, but it’s hard. It probably needs to be done separately from arguing about pay or anything really. Persuasion is about trust and trust is based on relationships, which take time to grow. If you know human nature, it should be obvious most people do not want their values changed. Do you want someone to change yours? Those leaders who disappoint you have spent as many years with their values as you have, possibly more. Influencing people’s values can be done but it takes skill and time. It’s a kind of gravity problem that only fools think can be easily done.

The good argument

I call this the good argument because it’s more likely to be effective, but you are probably not going to like it. Why? The good argument doesn’t come from you. It comes from important people talking about how valuable you are.

Don’t believe me? Consider these two statements:

• Designer: “I should be paid more!”

• Project leader: “Designers should be paid more!”

Which is more effective? More persuasive? More likely to signify to leaders that their values should be reconsidered?

The question then is how do you get project leaders, engineers, marketers or anyone to feel this way about your work? It probably starts by learning to understand their values better, rather than trying to convince them of yours.