what's the big deal about an annual salary of one million? For designers, yes.

There are not few jobs with an annual salary of one million in today's society. In finance, real estate, Internet and other industries, this income may just be the performance of the career on the right track. But in the design circle, this figure is rare, because the design circle is poor (especially industrial design).

"If you want to make money, don't learn design", I first saw this statement in Billwang, an industrial design forum that was popular for a while (more than ten years ago). At that time, a friend who switched from design to other industries made a small success (at that time, he reached the legendary monthly salary of over 11,111 yuan) and posted a post on the forum mocking the designers who were still struggling to design the front line. Later, they were full of gunpowder. Some people said that deserters were incompetent, while others said that they dreamed. However, the two sides in the quarrel have a common understanding on one point, that is, "Don't learn design if you want to make money". At that time, I was still a student, and I felt that I would not be that poor, but that I would be that special ...

Now I still vaguely remember my excitement when I got my first month's salary. After more than 21 years of academic torture, it finally paid off. Although the salary I got minus all kinds of insurance and taxes was almost enough to maintain a poor life, it didn't seem to matter with my love for industrial design and my vision for the future. At that time, the favorite thing to do at work was to listen to friends telling stories about the legendary Great God's annual salary of one million, and while listening to them, I added my brain to the plot, creating a happy illusion that all this was destined to happen to me. However, with the growth of experience, I gradually found that my labor income was not proportional to the salary growth rate, and I brought more and more benefits to the company, and my income did not improve significantly. My family began to point fingers at my work, and "other people's children" found jobs with stable income and good work without overtime. Enthusiasm is consumed a little bit like this, and getting rid of poverty has become an eternal topic among colleagues unconsciously. As the ideal is flaked off by the impact of reality, I keep asking myself, is it really worth it to eat bran and drink thin, and the work intensity is comparable to carrying a big bag? Not only do I have to live on my parents' subsidies, but I also have to touch my wallet to buy a gift for my beloved goddess. Is this the life I want? Recalling the predecessor's sentence "Don't learn design if you want to make money", what a painful realization.

However, the purpose of my article is not to demonstrate the well-known nonsense that "designers are poor". It is said that designers are poor, but generals can also be pulled out. What we want to discuss is how to make our career progress and get rid of poverty like a big cow. To make our career progress, we must first understand where the floor and ceiling of the industry are. Taking this as a frame of reference, we can know where we are and where we want to go.

since we want to establish a frame of reference and position ourselves, we can't just focus on industrial design. As we all know, every major has its dependent industries. For example, the industrial design I am familiar with is dependent on manufacturing. On a par with manufacturing, there are real estate, finance, internet, service industry and so on, and there are also differences between these industries in terms of wealth. Therefore, in order to fully understand the position of industrial design, we need to establish a more three-dimensional reference system from the following three angles:

1. Macroscopically, understand where the manufacturing income is in the whole job market.

2. In the middle view, there are also different professional divisions within the manufacturing industry, and what is the position of industrial design within the manufacturing industry.

3. Microscopically, there is also a gap between the rich and the poor within the industrial design circle. We should understand what this difference is and what caused it.

Macro: rich in industry, rich in specialty, poor in industry and poor in specialty

In fact, designers keep calling for poverty, which is a sense of body. Everyone generally feels that their income is low, and labor and income are not proportional. But in fact, the society is much poorer than the design industry, not to mention the vast number of working people working in rural areas. Even in cities, there are a large number of grassroots service industries, and the average income cannot be compared with designers. The designer's sense of poverty is actually because everyone classifies themselves as "mental workers" and takes the "white-collar" lifestyle as their goal, but in the white-collar ranks of mental work, we are a little dwarfed. But in a large number of industries with lower income, they may still be full of longing and envy for the design industry. If you get the average income of designers in the catering industry, you should be considered a fairly senior practitioner in that industry. Therefore, in fact, a person's income is largely limited by his own industry.

back to design, design, as a technology, has a great span in the social division of labor, and has been embedded in various industries, from the logo menu of hotels, to the appearance and packaging of products, to web pages or buildings. All areas that people can touch with the five senses need design, and designers will also have jobs. Industrial design is a design category attached to manufacturing industry, so what about the income of manufacturing industry?

The above picture is the data of the average income of the industry in 2118 found by Baidu. Generally speaking, when we say that an industry is rich, we mean that the average salary of this industry is high, and high-paying jobs are more likely to be distributed in industries with high wages. From this data, we can see that the average income of manufacturing industry was lower than the social average in 2118, while the average income of the highest information software service industry was nearly twice that of manufacturing industry.

This is also the reason why with the development of Internet technology in recent years, the positions of UI and UE, the close relatives of industrial design, of Internet companies represented by BAT are so high-paid. After all, the programmers next door have high incomes. No matter what design they do, design is a part of the R&D team. It is unreasonable that the salary is too low, and the income will naturally rise. Exaggerated, even if it is cleaning, it may be that going to an Internet company will pay more than coming to a manufacturing company ... So industrial design is attached to a manufacturing industry with a low average income, and the salary is worrying in a high probability.

However, the good news is that with the rapid development of Internet technology, it is difficult to separate product software and hardware, and industrial design has gradually acquired the attributes of Internet companies in addition to manufacturing. On the one hand, many manufacturing companies have started to do software ecology. On the other hand, many Internet companies have started to do hardware, and many emerging companies have started to combine software and hardware. This phenomenon provides many high-paying jobs for industrial design majors. I think this is the future development trend, and the average income of industrial design will gradually approach that of Internet companies. But then again, this transformation takes time, and now most industrial design is still concentrated around the manufacturing industry, and the salary is closer to the manufacturing standards.

So if a person wants to earn money, the quickest and most rational choice is to go to industries with high average salary, such as Internet and finance. Even being a crane tail is more likely than other industries. Now think about what wise advice my parents wanted me to go to the bank.

However, if the average wage of manufacturing industry is low, there is also an obvious loophole in inferring the low income of industrial design major, that is, manufacturing industry provides a large number of low-income workers' positions in factories, which lowers the average income of manufacturing industry. And R&D positions such as industrial designers and engineers are usually more important in the manufacturing industry, and the income should naturally be high in the manufacturing industry. I think this judgment is half right. It is true that industrial designers should be paid a lot more than workers on average, but they rank lower in R&D positions. Then I will specifically talk about why industrial design is still a crane tail in the R&D team of manufacturing industry ... < P > Middle view: Why is industrial design a blue-collar among white-collar workers?

back in the manufacturing industry, all industrial designers who have had product experience know that the income of engineers in the structure, hardware, software and so on next door is good, and they have a high probability of surpassing industrial designers with the same qualifications. After a long time in the manufacturing industry, it gradually formed a sense that engineers earn more than designers. I think this is not an illusion, but a reflection of the characteristics of the industrial design industry. Just as the workers in the assembly plant are destined to be in the lower reaches of the manufacturing industry because of their low added value, industrial design also has its own position, and this position can't be maintained for the following reasons:

1. A product only needs one ID, but it needs many engineers.

theoretically, an industrial designer can control a product from beginning to end, but the corresponding structure, hardware and software engineers need a lot. Especially for high-paying ID positions, it is usually in large companies. For example, in the past, a mobile phone research and development team of Nokia had hundreds of functional departments, and a designer had to correspond to a team of structural engineers of about 5 people and a larger team of hardware engineers to ensure product quality and progress. So generally speaking, a hardware product provides a high-paid senior designer position, but it needs the assistance of many more senior engineers with the same qualifications and salary. From a proportional point of view, the probability of being an engineer naturally is much higher. Designers are like salt in cooking. Cooking can't be delicious without salt, but only a little salt is enough ...

2. The design is valuable, but it's not sure how much it is worth.

I believe that designers who do industrial design have been asked this question: "How many more products can you sell with this design? How much can it be expensive? " . The importance of design has been a * * * knowledge in this era. Everyone agrees that a good design can affect the overall profit of the product, and there is no way to measure how much a good design can make the product sell more.

Design is subjective. You said honey, but he thought it was poison. A large part of design is a kind of work that is conducted through products with one's own feelings and infects others. But feeling this thing is subjective. Everyone feels that he is the center of the world. During these years of work, I have met many confident customers and feel that if I can make drawings, I can do better than designers. A designer who you think is worth $ million thinks it is worth $11. As long as you don't produce it for a double-blind test, you can't prove that your design is more valuable. Compared with the engineers next door, it is different. Every detail design can be quoted, and how much money can be saved if one screw is missing. The cost saved by a senior structure from a product is real financial data, which can be more or less converted into the engineer's salary.

but the designer spends money to turn a screw that is usually invisible from the primary color into black, which increases the cost and puts the figures there, but the benefits after the design improvement are immeasurable. Just as you don't know how long the cat killed by Schrodinger lived, you are not sure how much credit the designer has ...

In this world of certainty and value, certainty is the only weakness of design. There is no confidence in talking about money ...

3. The designer must be Lei Feng.

The more powerful a designer is, the less he looks like an artist, the more he looks like a product manager or even a CEO. Industrial design is a kind of work to package scientific and technological innovation into a good experience and convey it to users. A good product is a series of good experiences, and the user's experience runs through the whole process of the whole product from scratch to scratch, and there is always room for improvement in each stage of experience. Therefore, every excellent designer has actually become a product manager out of his professional consciousness, and he is responsible for all product experiences. In this responsible process, he needs to expand a large number of comprehensive interdisciplinary abilities and even get involved in other fields, which leads to many times that designers help people across departments to volunteer. In the end, although the success of products benefits from design, design has not been recognized accordingly. After all, it is not human nature to share credit achievements. As the saying goes, Lei Feng can't leave a name for his good deeds, let alone collect money! (This is why design has gradually evolved various design processes to standardize and define the impact of design, which is another story, and there is not enough space to mention it here.)

Therefore, the professional characteristics of design determine that the bargaining power of design in the manufacturing R&D team is not high, especially after reaching a high-end position, the job responsibilities are vague, with the salary of engineers and the heart of the boss. The combination of these factors has made industrial design a low position among white-collar workers in manufacturing industry.

micro: wages are set by peers.

Only when the industry is rich macroscopically can the profession have the possibility of being rich. In the middle view, the specialty is unique, and the cake in the professional market is big. On the micro level of industrial design circle, the fewer people divide the cake, the more cakes everyone gets.

If the size of a professional cake (the total economic value of the job market) is determined by the market conditions of the macro-industry and the professional characteristics of the middle industry, then the salary of everyone in the industry is actually determined by the number and quality of peers. Let's imagine that if there is only one industrial designer in the world, then all companies in the manufacturing industry will inevitably rob this unique designer for their own profits. Whoever grabs it may crush other companies and become the leader. In this case, even if the professional characteristics of industrial design itself are worrying, the income of this designer can never be low. This is the power of the word "scarcity" in the free market. However, the designer industry has a shallow relationship with scarcity.

Scarcity can be simply understood as short supply, and there are two key factors, one is demand and the other is supply. If 11 companies need designers, but actually only 1 designers apply, then this person will be scarce and the salary will go up; On the other hand, there are only 1.1 companies in the market that need designers, but if 11 designers apply, the salary of designers is hard to talk about. This is basic economic common sense, and I believe everyone understands it. So why do I say that industrial design is not related to scarcity?

1, the industrial design market is getting smaller and smaller, and the demand has peaked.

The whole hardware manufacturing enterprise itself has been in the late stage of shuffling. The fragmented manufacturing brands have been integrated into several giant brands, and the diversity of hardware design has been replaced by the diversity of APP, and the demand for industrial designers has also decreased. Take the mobile phone market in China as an example. If there is a demand for a mobile phone for the population of 1.3 billion in China, the total demand for the mobile phone market will be 1.3 billion. Before 2118, in addition to several big manufacturers, there were countless cottage mobile phone brands in the mobile phone market. Within one year, thousands of different styles of mobile phones were listed, and behind each different design was a designer position. With the landing of the first Android phone in 2118, a new generation of smart phones began to spread, the cottage phone market was gradually divided by several Android phone manufacturers, a large number of cottage phone companies closed down, dozens of mobile phone brands could serve the needs of 1.3 billion people, and the industrial design position was washed once. Later, around 2112, Xiaomi broke the balance by entering the smart phone market, and the remaining dozens of smart phone brands began a new round of reshuffle. For example, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and other giants have all fallen, and a large number of design jobs have disappeared during this period. Today, the designs of several companies can already serve the market of 1.3 billion people, and there are dozens of mainstream mobile phone styles on the market every year, which