Dive Club 🤿

This week's episode is with Danny Martinez and we're doing the ultimate deep dive into design hiring and what's happening in today's job market. Danny has the perfect vantage point as the CEO of Decimals—the platform that powers everything I do with the Dive Talent Network. So this episodes is about as practical as it gets.
- What companies want in a “design engineer”
- The biggest green and red flags from hiring managers
- How the best teams are iterating on the hiring process
- Examples of portfolios getting hired in the talent network
- Why brand design is the most difficult design role to hire for
- How to attract the most in-demand designers as a hiring manager
- The interaction design example hiring managers keep highlighting
- + a lot more

This week's episode is with Geoff Teehan—co-founder of the legendary design agency Teehan+Lax, longtime design leader at Facebook, and now Chief Design Officer at Lightspark.
Some highlights:
How Geoff has navigated multiple cycles of change
What the “parking spot” phase of software looks like
Why Geoff plans to only hire 4 designers at Lightspark
The design backstory behind Geoff’s viral Dialed game
How Geoff brings consumer principles into enterprise design
＋ a lot more

This week's episode is with Nev Flynn and we're doing a deep dive into how he's bringing artful expression into enterprise design as the Head of Design at ElevenLabs.
Some highlights:
Inside look at ElevenLabs internal brand tools
Why Nev is prioritizing specialists over generalists
What Nev looks for when evaluating a design portfolio
How they built a shader orb system for 40 million voices
What happens when non-designers are designing with AI
How the team is making their design system agent-native
a lot more

This week's episode is with Ed Bayes and we're doing a deep dive into how designers at OpenAI prototype the future of Codex/ChatGPT Work.
Some highlights:
- How prototyping at OpenAI has shifted recently
- The design challenges of bringing Codex into ChatGPT
- How Ed thinks about the spectrum of dynamic interfaces
- How Codex thought about their information architecture bets
- Why Ed structures design teams around personas not features
- The traits of the designers making the biggest impact at OpenAI
- + a lot more

The Bitter Lesson (http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html) — ML essay he referenced on scaffolding and model releases

This week’s episode is with Evil Rabbit who is the founding designer at Vercel and an iconic figure in the design community.
He shares his design journey (which started with his first job in Argentina at 12 years old)
So he’s going to share his journey in design and what it was like
Some highlights:
- What it takes to design an iconic brand identity
- How Vercel’s new Creative Studio team operates
- How he landed his first design job at 12 years old in Argentina
- Why Vercel is shifting from designing assets to building tools
- What he learned from working directly with Guillermo (Vercel CEO)
- + a lot more