How much I really made in my 1st year as a self-taught UX designer
At a top company, I got paid better than my peers with Ph.D.’s
My experience
4 years ago I quit my job, learned how to code, built a design portfolio, and became a UX Designer at a top company. I tripled my income that year.
I didn’t go back to school, I didn’t sign up for an expensive bootcamp. I was scrappy and figured out how to make it work. Here’s an article on how you can do what I did.
You can even grab a mentoring session with me if you want some more personalized help.
Let’s jump right in:
My First Year — A Complete Breakdown $$$
My Internship — $25 per hour
For the first 6 months I was an intern. They handed me a fancy 15" Macbook Pro on my very first day, and loaded it up with expensive software licenses I couldn’t have afforded on my own prior to that.
During that time, I worked my butt off to prove myself to my manager and the entire team so that I could get the full-time offer. I was slow with the tools we used at first, but I made up for that with sheer hours; working nights and weekends when I needed to.
To be clear, I was never pushed to do that (hence one of the reasons we always ranked so highly on that best places to work list). But you have to understand, I was so grateful and wasn’t going to let this opportunity slip through my fingers.
I was coming from a Psychology background; where internships were unpaid, and even fantastic Lecturers with Ph.D.’s were making around $45,000 a year at top Universities. I knew what I had.
I started my first day making $25 an hour as an intern. That’s $52,000 per year without having to go back to school at all.
Switching to Full-Time — $82,500
The first offer that I got was for $80,000 per year. I was shocked. That was more than many of my Tenure Track Ph.D. wielding peers in Psychology…if they were lucky.
This was a reach, but I’d been to enough Women in Leadership events at the company to know that women tend not to negotiate at all, and that puts them behind for the rest of their careers potentially. Even though I was more than happy with it, I asked for $82,500…and got it.
The switch to full-time came with free healthcare (paid for by Ultimate), a 45% 401k match with no cap (so the federal cap of $19,500 applied), 50 RSU’s that later sold for around $16,500 during a buyout, and unlimited PTO. That last 6 months, I used 10 days of it, and it was the first time I’d ever been paid to take time off.
Let me just say, vacation feels a lot better when you know you aren’t sacrificing your finances to do it!
2018: $69,728.62
- That first 6 months, I accrued sick time and vacation time (none of which I used), so I got that paid back at the end of the year.
- This also doesn’t show the RSU’s that later sold at $16,500 during our company buyout
Takeaways
To be fair, my pay is dwarfed by what the big tech companies in San Francisco pay their UX Designers. Apparently, that averages $94k — $134k. I never applied to them, so I have no way of knowing if I could have commanded an even higher salary right out the gate by going to one of those companies.
In my experience, Tech jobs are a great way to get into a field that’s still open to seeing what you know rather than only paying attention to what your official qualifications are.
🎉 Grab my totally FREE — Recommended Resources for New UX’ers 💸
Looking for 1:1 UX mentorship with me? Grab a spot here.