Why junior designers struggle to find their footing
On mentorship, AI, and the uncertain future of entry-level design roles
In the early days of tech, the path into design was winding but walkable. You learned by doing, often under the guidance of someone a few rungs ahead. Maybe you interned. Maybe someone took a chance on you. Either way, there was a ladder—rickety, inconsistent, but real.
Today, that ladder looks more like scaffolding abandoned mid-construction. Internships have dried up. Entry-level roles are MIA. Senior designers are burnt out, too busy, or too bewildered by AI to mentor the next generation. So a new cohort is entering the field without structure, without support, and increasingly, without much guidance beyond ChatGPT and a UI kit.
I spoke with Sabina Cabrera—a NYC-based designer, illustrator, and former chemist—who’s building her own ladder. The result isn’t perfect, but the impulse behind it reveals something urgent, generational, and worth paying attention to.
Design education in a vacuum
Sabina didn’t study design. She studied chemistry—polymer chemistry, to be exact—and taught organic chemistry at UCLA and NYU before pivoting into UX via a new job, Figma help docs, and a lot of Googling. Her story is less unusual than it sounds: self-taught, nonlinear, shaped more by necessity than design.
“If my brain got wiped and I had to learn design tomorrow,” she tells me. “I truly don’t know where I’d start.”
In 2021, the internet promised a pathway: take a course, do a bootcamp, land a job. But by 2024, many of those entry-level roles had vanished. What remains is a disjointed patchwork—Google UX certificates, influencer-led Notion templates, an endless glut of YouTube explainers. It’s an ecosystem full of resources but devoid of orientation.
So Sabina built PogiDraw, a prototype for a design learning tool—something between LeetCode and a practice sandbox, intended to help junior designers improve through structured prompts. The idea had been on her mind for a while, but with AI, Sabina was able to finally build it. It’s already gone through several iterations.
The shifting landscape has made it increasingly difficult to define what baseline knowledge junior designers should possess. “At this point, I don’t even know what a junior shouldn’t know,” Sabina says. She’s spoken with hiring managers, agencies, and junior designers to refine the concept, adding features like a community forum and—coming soon—some stealth AI-driven feedback tools.
She’s the first to admit it’s unfinished, but it’s a signal: when institutions fail, people start prototyping their own paths.
Mentorship, interrupted
Design has a mentorship problem. Not just in frequency, but in infrastructure. The scaffolding that once supported it—internships, early-career programs, generous managers with time to spare—has largely eroded. Sabina puts it this way: “We’re entering an era where a lot of people just haven’t been mentored, so they’re like, ‘Why would I do that for someone else?’”
She’s not wrong. Senior designers today are more likely to be navigating layoffs than onboarding interns. Even those inclined to give back are operating in survival mode. “If you’re a designer today, you’re not chilling,” she says. “You’re like, ‘What’s all this AI stuff? I don’t have time to educate tomorrow’s designers while trying to learn new tools and also make sure I don’t get laid off.’”
In an era of mass layoffs, design orgs shrinking from ten to two, and “do more with less” directives from on high, mentorship becomes a luxury. Not because no one wants to mentor, but because the structure and incentives to do so have been hollowed out.
And in the absence of guidance, many junior designers have defaulted to another proxy for mentorship: social media. “A lot of people I talk to just follow the high-follower-count designers on Twitter,” Sabina notes. “That becomes the roadmap.” But influence isn’t the same as insight—and the algorithm rarely rewards nuance.
Designers as builders (and critics)
For years, designers occupied a liminal space—somewhere between product and engineering. You translated stakeholder wants into user needs, crafted interfaces, and maybe, if lucky, shipped work with your name on it.
Now, the vibe has shifted. We’ve gone from “a seat at the table” to “build the table yourself.” AI tools are lowering the barrier to creation while raising the bar for participation. Designers are expected to code. To ship. To become founders. It’s the era of “you can just do things.”
“Using Al effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify,” CEO Tobi Lutke recently wrote in an internal memo. “...If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.”
Sabina isn’t so sure. “A startup is different from a good idea,” she says. “Because then you have to do payroll.” And yet, she did build something. Not a company, but a counterpoint: PogiDraw pushes back on the notion that design is dying, that mentorship doesn’t matter, that taste can be automated. She’s especially wary of the move-fast-and-vibe-code demos cluttering Twitter: “Are you going to hand that off to anyone? Is it responsive? Or is it just Cursor code for likes?”
We know that speed and quality aren’t the same. But we reward fast more than we reward good. Especially in AI-land, where the dopamine loop favors spectacle over durability.
LeetCode conundrum
This tension—between training and tooling—is playing out beyond design. Take Roy Lee, a former Columbia student who built Interview Coder, an AI assistant to help solve live coding problems during technical interviews. The tool landed him offers from Amazon, Meta, TikTok, and Capital One—before Amazon raised ethical concerns with his school. Roy posted everything on Twitter.
His defense? He wasn’t cheating—he was challenging the system. “The questions are not indicative of what you do in the real world. They’re riddles that you have to memorize,” he says, critiquing LeetCode-style interviews as a poor proxy for real-world skill. Sound familiar?
“Design interviews are all over the place,” Sabina says. “We’re hiring for the same role, but asking totally different things.” She’s not necessarily against that, as it reflects the complexity of design itself, but it shifts the burden onto early-career designers to be prepared for anything: ambiguous briefs, inconsistent expectations, and founder-led companies with chaotic roadmaps and high standards.
When hiring is this inconsistent—and feedback loops are nonexistent—it becomes nearly impossible to know if you’re getting better. No wonder designers are turning to AI tools, or building their own.
Are you my mentor?
The question comes up a lot in my digital and IRL coffees: How do you find a mentor? How do you ask someone to be your mentor? Some advice I often share:
Start with curiosity. Name what drew you to them—a project, an essay, a sentence that stuck. It’s thoughtful, and gives context.
Ask for advice, not a solution. Most people can only speak from their own experience. Don’t expect answers to your entire career.
Make your ask specific and achievable. “I’m navigating a shift into design engineering and wondering how to position myself for early-stage roles” is better than “Can I pick your brain?”
Make it easy to say yes. Offer a few times. Include your calendar link. Do the work up front.
Don’t fear the no. Make rejection routine, not a threat. Rejection is a muscle. Flex it.
Try passive mentorship. Some of my best mentors didn’t know they were mentors. I followed their work. I learned from how they moved. Sending an occasional update or thoughtful question can build a relationship over time.
And remember: Mentorship is a two-way street. Even if you’re early in your career, you bring something to the table—a fresh perspective, research energy, shared interests, curiosity. Don’t discount that.
Where to find mentors
Mentors don’t always sit on the next rung of your career ladder. Some of the best ones come from adjacent or unexpected places, or even peers. That’s often where the best questions come from, too. AIGA/NY has a great mentorship program, and I love the work Scope of Work (SOW) is doing to support early-career BIPOC creatives. If you know of other resources, drop them in the comments. I’d love to know where mentorship is still happening.
Prototype, not product
Internships aren’t returning en masse. Mid-sized design teams with bandwidth to mentor and nurture talent aren’t reappearing tomorrow. But we are seeing new tools, new expectations, and new prototypes.
Maybe AI won’t teach you taste, but it can give you a starting point—a prompt, a scaffold, a step forward. The risk is that these tools replicate the same broken systems—now automated, flattened, and sold back to us via subscription. If we’re going to rethink design education, it has to be done with intention. The goal isn’t speed. It’s understanding.
PogiDraw is a step in that direction. If you’re interested in learning more, DM Sabina on X. It also does something important: it identifies the gap. It names the problem. And if more people start asking these same questions, well, that might be how new ladders get built.
—Carly