The Rising Tide

What 30 years of tech waves, real layoff data, and a morning surf session taught me about AI and the future of design.

There's a moment in the surf film Big Wednesday where the characters realize the wave they've spent years fearing and preparing for has finally arrived. It's bigger than anything they've faced before. And whether they're ready comes down to everything they've done, or failed to do, in the years leading up to it.

I've been thinking about that scene a lot lately.

Because I want to start by saying this plainly: my heart goes out to the thousands of people affected by the recent layoffs at Block. More than 4,000 employees, nearly 40% of the company, lost their jobs. Behind every percentage point are real people: designers, engineers, product managers, operators. Talented people who built products, led teams, and supported families. For them, this isn't a debate about strategy or technology. It's a deeply personal disruption.

When CEO Jack Dorsey explained the decision, he framed it around operating with smaller, flatter teams in an AI-driven era. More leverage, fewer people, more output. He didn't say AI directly replaced these employees. But the message was unmistakable: AI changes the productivity equation. And when a CEO publicly connects workforce reductions to AI-enabled efficiency at that scale, it lands heavily across the industry.

It certainly landed heavily for me.

A few days after the Block news broke, I was having lunch with a friend after a morning surf session at Ocean Beach. Another design director, a fellow surfer, someone I've known for years. We got to talking about the waves we've ridden together in this industry.

We started our careers during the dot-com boom, when the internet was new and every pixel felt like it mattered. Then came the crash. Then the iPhone arrived and mobile changed everything, and the entire design discipline had to rebuild itself around a small glass rectangle. Then social media rewired how people related to products, to each other, to information itself. Each wave disrupted our work. Each time we had to adapt, retool, and find our footing again.

We've been doing this for thirty years.

And each time, we made it through. We built careers. Raised kids. Stayed in San Francisco. Kept finding reasons to be genuinely excited about designing digital products, which, if you've done this long enough, is not something you take for granted.

But sitting there after our surf, we both got quiet for a moment.

Because this wave feels different. Not just bigger, though it is. Different in kind. The previous waves changed the medium we designed for. This one feels like it's changing what design is. And for the first time in thirty years, I found myself asking a question I've never seriously entertained before: what if this is the wave you don't paddle back out from?

I don't think that's true. But I think it's an honest question. And I think anyone who tells you they haven't asked it isn't really paying attention.

This article is my attempt to look at that question directly, with data, with honesty, and with whatever perspective thirty years of riding tech waves can offer. Not to reassure you falsely. But because I'm looking for the same thing most of you are: a reason to paddle back out.

What three million job postings actually say

I'll be transparent: I'm also in the middle of my own job search right now. So I didn't want to lean on fear or instinct alone. I wanted to look at what the data actually shows.

In 2025, Autodesk released its first AI Jobs Report, analyzing nearly three million job postings across technology, architecture, engineering, manufacturing, and media. The findings were striking. Mentions of AI skills in job listings grew 114% in 2023, another 120% in 2024, and are up 56% year-to-date in 2025. AI fluency is no longer a differentiator. It's quickly becoming the baseline expectation.

But the most important finding wasn't the growth. It was this: design skills have overtaken traditional technical skills like coding, cloud expertise, and systems architecture in AI-specific job postings.

That's worth sitting with for a moment.

Companies hiring around AI aren't just looking for people who can build models. They're actively prioritizing people who can shape how AI is experienced, how it behaves, how it communicates, how it earns trust from the humans using it. AI without design is brittle. AI without human-centered thinking is, at best, powerful and unusable.

If AI were simply washing design roles away, we wouldn't see design competencies rising to the top across millions of job listings. We're seeing the opposite. The data suggests AI is increasing the strategic value of design, not erasing it.

The hiring picture: growth, but not for everyone

Figma published their Design Hiring Study just this month, and the numbers are more encouraging than the headlines would suggest.

82% of hiring managers say their organization's need for designers has either increased or stayed steady, with nearly half saying demand has actually gone up. And AI is driving a lot of it. 73% of hiring managers now say they need candidates proficient in AI tools, and 79% say the same about designing AI products specifically.

But there's a nuance worth being honest about. More than half of hiring managers say there's increasing demand for senior design hires, compared to just 25% who are hiring for more junior roles. That gap is real, and I worry about it. Breaking in right now is genuinely hard, and the best teams have always needed a range of experience levels to function well.

What the data signals clearly is that design isn't disappearing. The skills hiring managers consistently prioritize — visual craft, collaboration, systems thinking, product strategy — are ones that rely on judgment and context, not automation. Execution is being compressed. Judgment is being elevated.

From making screens to shaping intelligence

Here's the uncomfortable truth I've been sitting with. If AI can generate a first-pass UI, assist with code, explore dozens of variations in minutes, and document its own outputs, then roles built primarily around production will shrink. Maybe significantly.

That's hard to say out loud. But I think it's honest.

What it doesn't mean is that design disappears. It means design has to move upstream, into the decisions that determine what gets built, how it behaves, and whether it deserves the trust it's asking for from real people.

I saw this firsthand at Walmart, where I led design on a multimodal AI search experience that lets customers use their camera to find and buy products. That work wasn't about making screens look good. It was about designing the intelligence layer itself: how the system interprets ambiguous real-world input, how it communicates confidence and uncertainty, how it recovers gracefully when it gets something wrong. That's the kind of design work AI is creating, not eliminating. And it requires judgment, empathy, and systems thinking that can't be reduced to a prompt.

The question for your portfolio isn't whether you used AI. It's whether you can show how AI changed what you were able to build, and what you designed that wouldn't have existed without you in the room.

For junior designers, I know this moment feels particularly hard. The entry point is narrower than it was. For senior designers, the pressure is different but no less real. Expectations are higher, the bar for strategic contribution keeps rising, and the work of proving continued relevance never really stops. For both, the direction is the same: AI fluency isn't an advantage anymore. It's the price of admission.

What I actually believe

I won't pretend this moment doesn't worry me. The tech industry is restructuring faster than most teams can responsibly adapt. I worry about young designers trying to get their first role in a market that has quietly tightened. I worry about companies chasing efficiency without fully accounting for what gets lost when you thin out the humans in the room. I worry about talented, experienced colleagues who still can't find their footing right now.

And I hold all of that alongside something I genuinely see in the data and in the work: a real path forward. Not an easy one. Not one that's available equally to everyone. But a real one.

If AI changes the productivity equation, and it clearly does, then our job is to change our own equation in response. To deepen the skills that compound over time: strategic thinking, ethical judgment, the ability to design systems that actually work for people. To become genuinely fluent in AI workflows, not as a performance of relevance, but because it makes us better at the work that matters.

None of that guarantees safety. I've been around long enough to know that nothing does.

The water's always moving

Thirty years of this has taught me one thing above all else. The designers who survive disruption aren't the ones who were most comfortable when the wave hit. They're the ones who understood what they were actually good at and stayed close to that, even as everything around them changed.

The waves keep coming. They always have. Dot-com. Crash. Mobile. Social. Now this.

Each one felt, in the moment, like it might be the one that finally closed out the whole lineup. Each one demanded something different from us. Each one passed and left behind a changed landscape that rewarded the people who'd been quietly preparing.

I don't know with certainty that this wave is the same. It's bigger than anything I've seen. The horizon looks different from here. But I've paddled out in conditions I didn't think I could handle before, and I've made it back to shore.

So have you.

The water's always moving. The question, the only question that's ever really mattered, is whether you're willing to paddle back out.

—

Lance is a design director, principal designer, and AI product leader with 30 years of experience shaping digital products across some of the world's most recognized companies. Most recently he led design on Walmart's multimodal AI shopping experiences, helping customers find and buy products through the power of their camera. Before that he spent years at Adobe working on AI-first creative tools. He writes about design leadership, AI integration, and the future of the industry in his newsletter, Design Amplified.

He's also a surfer. Mostly at Ocean Beach, whenever the swell cooperates. 🤙