Hang Xu
Radically Reinventing Design Recruitment
In this episode of Brave UX, Hang Xu shares why he’s trying to make recruitment more ethical 📖, how candidates can secure the best possible compensation 💰, and what to watch out for when working with recruiters 🦹♂️.
Highlights include:
- Why is it important to always go for the maximum salary available?
- What can a candidate do to positively influence a levelling decision?
- Why do candidates with the same skills get paid vastly different amounts?
- Do you still believe that candidates should sometimes go back on their word?
- What is pre-closing and why don’t you feel that it’s a fair recruitment practice?
Who is Hang Xu?
Hang is a former product designer who, in late in 2022, became the founding talent agent of Collective Supply 👻, a recruitment agency that matches senior UX talent with companies who have ethical hiring practices.
Collective Supply believes that - in their own words - “the interview process should be ethical, transparent and respectful”, and they promise not to “shoehorn designers into crappy roles”, just so they can collect a commission 👍.
Before founding Collective Supply, Hang was a Senior Staff UX Designer at Boston Dynamics, one of the world’s leading robotics companies 🤖. There, Hang led the UX, UI and service design for the company’s first warehouse automation robot, called Stretch.
Hang also previously worked as a Product Design Lead for Diligent Corporation, Principal UX Lead for Gemini.com, and Product Designer for Bloomberg 📈.
Transcript
- Hang Xu:
- And the crazy thing is I think I'm near the top percentile in terms of salary, but I remember talking to my wealth advisor at Fidelity and he's like, yeah, you're just not on track to retire by 65.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class human-centered research and innovation lab. You can find out more about what we do at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the fields of UX research, product management and design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders in those fields.
- My guest today is Hang Xu. Hang is a former product designer who in late 2022 became the founding talent agent of Collective Supply, a recruitment agency that matches senior UX talent with companies who have ethical hiring practices.
- Collective Supply believes that, in their own words, "the interview process should be ethical, transparent, and respectful", and they promise "not to shoehorn designers into crappy roles just so they can collect a commission".
- Before founding Collective Supply, Hang was a senior staff UX designer at Boston Dynamics, one of the world's leading robotics companies. There, Hang led the UX, UI and service design for the company's first warehouse automation robot called Stretch.
- Hang also previously worked as a product design lead for Diligent Corporation, principal UX lead for gemini.com and product designer for Bloomberg.
- A popular voice for design on LinkedIn, where he is known for his outspoken and sometimes controversial opinions, I've been looking forward to speaking with Hang today. Hang, hello and a very warm welcome to the show.
- Hang Xu:
- Oh my God, thank you so much for having me here today. This is such an honor and I've been looking forward to this for quite a while now.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's really my pleasure to have you here Hang and thank you for bearing with me as I made my way through my first recorded intro in over a month, which was a bit of an ordeal, but we are here now and I'm very pleased to be here. Hang. I wanted to start with something that if we rewind the clock a little bit on your life, here is your time studying film, cinema and video at RISD in the mid two thousands. And I am clearly aware that today as we are recording, you are a recruiter for designers and I was curious about how much of a divergence is it in terms of where you find now to where you saw yourself being in the mid two thousands while you were at risd?
- Hang Xu:
- Yeah, that's a great question. I don't think I could possibly have imagined where I would be today back then, and so much has changed in the landscape of design and tech that back then I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do and I only chose film and animation because two friends of mine I met Tom and Ivan upperclassmen were in film and I figured if I liked them as people, I might just like the same things they did. And I also really loved my neighbor Toro when I was younger. I remember that's one of the first movies I watched as a child back in China. And that movie stuck with me for so long that I wanted to create similar things to that. Unfortunately at the time I did so poorly at RISD that I got kicked out of school about halfway through my sophomore year due to how bad my grades were and I probably had undiagnosed A D H D at the time, a host of other issues. So back then it was pretty devastating. But looking back, I'm kind of glad that happened to me because of how the field of design animation have both changed and the winding path that I took to get to where I'm today.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, that's interesting. And I recently spoke with Alistair Simpson, who's the VP of designer at Dropbox and Alistair had wanted to be a professional football in the UK and was on that track, but he didn't get picked and so he also had a big setback fairly early on. I think he was around 16 years old at that stage. And he talked to me about how he recovered from that setback and used that to fuel his next move. You mentioned that that was, it sounded like it was quite a confronting situation for you to be kicked out of school that maybe there was some things going on there in terms of undiagnosed A D H D. It was quite devastating I think was the word that you used. How did you find your way through that? What did you experience that helped you to pick yourself up and move on and what did you end up moving on to?
- Hang Xu:
- I moved on to a bunch of random other stuff that had nothing to do with animation and I started to work in the arts field afterwards. I knew that I really liked art, I liked design, I just didn't really know what I wanted to do. And the thing was that back then we didn't really have UX, well, we did, but now in the way that we have today where you can get pretty high salaries and I struggled to figure out what could I possibly do with my career. And I went into arts, I went into graphic design, went into photography, also stone carving with carving all the different things that I thought would be interesting. And to be honest, it was a long period of me struggling to figure out what I wanted to do. There wasn't a pivotal moment where I dust myself off and thought, Hey, now it's the time for me from animation to something else. It was a constant struggle and a long process of trying out different things until something finally stuck.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And what was it that stuck?
- Hang Xu:
- It was UX design and that was not the original intention. I think there was one moment where, I mean at the time I was just super, super broke and poor. I was making about $25,000 per year, which is not a lot of money in New York City. I was still living at home and a really good friend of mine from high school named Wayne had just recently been laid off from Starbucks as a barista and he got an internship as an Android developer through one of his friends. And after the internship he was making $70,000. And I remember I was talking about, I was like, wow, that's a lot of money. I'd be so happy if I ever made that kind of money in my life. And I think what was really cool about that was Wayne was one of those folks who were so open and just really kind and giving and said, Hey, if I can do this, you can do it as well.
- Hang. And that really stuck with me. I felt like I could make that career jump from design and photography over to coding. So I tried to pick up iOS and it was not Swift back then. It was objective C, which was pretty difficult to learn. And through that I got into UX design mainly through this wonderful person I met at a meetup and it was one of those meetups where you exchange your designs for critique by other parties and this other UX designer saw a designer had made and he said, well, this is the best thing I saw all year. And looking back, I think Pier, the guy was extremely generous and very kind to me to kind of motivate me and to pick me up a little bit. Maybe he sensed that I was kind of down and about at the time, but that really helped a lot. That kind of solidified my idea that I could become a decent UX designer and I also noticed that as I'm learning objective C versus UX design, I was definitely much faster at learning design. So I think that's probably the thing that really helped.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I noticed on your LinkedIn profile that between 2010 and 2015 you had invested five years or so in what you've called being a freelance designer, and that involved both designer physical installations and digital experiences for museums and galleries that people probably heard of because these are some big names here, MoMA, the Guggenheim, and also the Stephen Cashier Gallery in New York. As I said, those are big names. These aren't small time galleries. These are the real deal. How did this come to be and how did you come to go from someone who was ostensibly kicked out of RISD for whatever reason, to someone who was actually working with some of the biggest names in the art world?
- Hang Xu:
- Yeah, the thing is that working in big names in the art world doesn't actually mean a whole lot because the pay was really awful. The arts field fashion can be quite exploitative, even though at the time I was like, whoa, I'm working at these museums, I'm working for these big artists. I felt like, hey, this is really the best I could look forward to, but really I'm making 20 or $25 an hour max. Oh, and no benefits either, which definitely eats in and these are all part-time gigs, so just kind of straight them up together was really difficult to do. They didn't care about my lack of degree. Fortunately, it was more about can you actually do the work? Can you make these things work, these physical installations and kind of figure out all the difficult and weird problems that you would come across in terms of working with different types of material, working with some digital devices. I think our adrenal background is pretty big, so that's how you would program certain artistic pieces. Most of the jobs back then I had to find through Craigslist.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Interesting. You took this experience and used it to, I use this term break in which is a term I don't really like, but it's a common term that people use when they talk about getting into product or UX or tech. You use these experiences to break into the industry, and I also noticed on your profile that there's a period between 2014 and 2015 that immediately precedes the transition you made into UX where you were winning lots of awards for hackathons. And I've also heard you talk about what I believe is this period in your life, and I'll just quote you now you've said about this, it took me about a year to get my first job in UX and that was the worst time of my life, literally. I would not wish that on anyone. It sounds like you regret doing it.
- Hang Xu:
- No, absolutely not. I don't regret doing that. I somewhat regret the way I did it. And when you say those experiences working on installations and at museums, help me break into UX. To be honest, those experiences were not directly transferable, so of course you can learn soft skills, you do need to persevere through certain things. You do need to work with people and to take directions and to understand what people are talking about when they're not being super straightforward with you or they're cryptic in terms of their instructions. But overall, what helped me break into UX was deciding at one point that I did not want to continue doing this anymore because if you're working as an assistant to artists or you're working for artists, there is no career path really. You'll continue working the same things over and over again and the only way to break out of it is to one day say, Hey, I'm going to be my own artist and I'm going to create artworks of my own, which can be extremely difficult.
- It's not like you graduate or get promoted into that role. When I finally decided I wanted to change my career, I didn't really know how to go about it because back then we had a few rudimentary bootcamps out there. I think general assembly had just come about, and the cost of tuition was prohibitively expensive. So I resorted to learning everything on my own. And back then we didn't really have the same kind of resources that we do today where you can Google or YouTube any videos you want to learn about information architecture or how to use Figma to animate or to create prototypes. You had a bunch of disparate blog articles and little tidbits here and there, and there wasn't really a mentorship network like you would have with a d p list. So it was very much me clobbering stuff together and trying to read as much as possible.
- And my schedule was pretty horrible. Looking back, it was literally studying seven days a week for almost a year. I barely saw any of my friends. I would wake up in the morning and just kind of read articles, learn about UX, and then work on creating a portfolio that was half decent and around four or five o'clock I would get ready for a meetup and eat the free pizza, free food they had there and network and meet people and then weekends would be devoted to hackathons. So that schedule was not realistic or tenable. I think my mental health really suffered. I went into a lot of credit card debt to support that kind of full steam ahead process. It was not a smart move. I think I could have done it by being much kinder to myself, taking care of my mental health, making sure that I had a financial runway, and I think I very much paid for it in terms of my health, both physical and mental and also having to pay off quite a bit of interest rates.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, there's only, I suppose one way to learn the harsh lesson of compounding interest that works against you, and that's to run up bills on credit cards for sure. And I totally hear you there. Let's talk about mental health. Let's follow that thread and let's fast forward to the middle of last year now. So middle of 2022. Now until then, you used to be a senior staff designer at Boston Dynamics, which is where, as I mentioned in your introduction, you led the design for their first warehouse robot and also the strategy for getting it into warehouses. And from what I gather, it sounds like a pretty successful project. I think there was something to the effect of 15 million worth of sales made fairly soon once it was on the market to some pretty amazing companies or pretty big brands. So it sounds really successful, but it also came at a personal cost, didn't it?
- Hang Xu:
- To be honest, the real stars of a robot like that are the roboticists and mechanical engineers. I'm just designing the user interface to control the robot, and that's just such a small piece of it compared to the rest of the robot. It's like somebody designing an entire car and really I'm designing the odometer an important part for sure, but definitely not the main course of what the product is. And I think the mental health aspect had less to do with the complexity or the challenges of building a product of that complexity or ambition, more to do with interpersonal challenges that I was coming across. And I think in most cases, at least in my career, just in terms of my abilities and my experiences as a designer, most of the stress that I crave for myself are either due to me or due to interpersonal challenges as opposed to how difficult the work is.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Can you speak to some of those interpersonal challenges or those areas of yourself in those situations that you've perhaps with a little bit of distance from what happened about a year ago that you've been able to learn from or some of the things that you have committed to, if this is the case, to doing differently in the future as a result of that experience?
- Hang Xu:
- Yeah, I think for me personally, I've been very lucky in terms of getting to work with engineers that I very much almost always got along with really well. And for whatever reason, I've just been lucky enough to work with engineers who very much understood design and respected it, but I've had a more challenging time with product managers for whatever reason. And it can, I think there are obviously many sides to a story, and I think it's a combination of just how I tend to work with product managers or maybe how I view the difference between product management and design as well as generally the kind of companies I've worked at and how they view and treat product management and also the kind of PMs that typically fall into those kind of roles. So how I would do things differently, I've learned a lot just through trial and error.
- That's kind of my primary way of learning. I think probably the most important thing to understand is that every company is very different and they tend to have their own systems in place and pushing against that system can be extremely difficult from a design perspective. So even if you have your own view of what design should be, what UX and product design should entail in terms of responsibilities and goals, ultimately you do have to respect the system and the culture that is the company. And you have to understand it early on so you know what you're getting yourself into and also know when you can push and when you have to kind of back off a little bit. And for me, I just took maybe a little bit too long to figure out that boundary and I've always instead try to push for what I consider to be a better or more optimal way of doing things.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds to me like you had a challenge with product manager or product management function in your role as a designer, and it's almost as if it sounded like that role of product management was you were equating it with the company system and I was interested in the conflict, I suppose that arose for you there in the way that you thought things should be done versus the way that they actually were happy with them being done.
- Hang Xu:
- Yeah, I tend to see product management as more of a strategic role and also a high level of accountability as well. So ultimately I would expect the product manager and also the designer that is partner with the PM to be held accountable for the performance of the product or feature that they're in charge of. And what I found oftentimes is that a PM due to the system that the company has created can often end up becoming like a waiter or as that's basically what Melissa Perry described in escaping the bill trap, the persona or archetype of the PM archetype of a waiter where they're constantly waiting for a C E O or VP or chief of product to describe exactly what to build, and then they would race off and figure out the nuts and bolts of how you would make this work within a short time constraint.
- And that's usually where they would pull a designer in and say, Hey, we need you to build this for whatever reason. And if you were to ask them, why are we building this? Why do we need to meet this deadline? They will give you some reason, but as you dig deeper through asking the whys, eventually the reason comes down to because so-and-so said so. And I always found that really frustrating as a designer who is more focused on the outcomes that were being built. So I think that's kind of the biggest difference. And also when I talk about PMs, I think one thing that people tend to assume when I say PMs or some PMs out there might be over level might have transitioned from say a product analyst or business analyst role or project management or oftentimes product marketing into a PM role. When I say they're over level a little bit, I don't mean that okay, they lack certain finesse or certain high level skillset that makes it easier for them to work with designers, engineers. I'm talking about really fundamental things like a lack of a roadmap. For example, a lot of places I've been and also based on what I've seen from other people who work at different companies, when you look at what the roadmap is really it's just a feature backlog and there is no strategy behind it, beyond here's how we prioritize it, here's exactly what we're going to build. And oftentimes when you ask a PM you're working with, what's the difference between a product roadmap versus a backlog? The answer is can be quite unsatisfactory.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How did you know you were burned out?
- Hang Xu:
- I started seeing a therapist and at some point things I used to be really excited about doing, I just had a hard time getting ready for. And I think one example would be portfolio creation. And unlike some other designers, when I'm really excited about what I built, I might feel like, Hey, I actually want to put this together into a case study and start interviewing. There's some parts of it that I really like. And I think at that point I realized I don't really want to do this right now and I would rather just do anything else but that. And I started to explore other hobbies that I was into at the time. And I think all in all, it just led me to believe that maybe there's more to it and also I'm willing to sacrifice a fairly stable income or salary so I can not do the things that I've been paid to do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you made quite the change. You became a recruiter, and I'll quote you again now about this. You said, I decided to go into recruiting and I think that gives me a fairly unique perspective because typically recruiters don't come from design. I realized, wow, I'm turning into what I hate, which that's a strong word, the hate words a strong one. Why do you hate recruiters?
- Hang Xu:
- I don't hate recruiters. I think there are certain parts of it that I really do not, and that has more to do with systems. I don't think similar to PMs, I don't think individual PMs are at fault for this necessarily, but it's more about how companies view product management, how companies build their own products. There's very little you can do if the system is set in such a way, it's not like you can just hire really good PM and everything will change. Oftentimes you end up hiring the kind of PM that would work within this weird system that we set up. And I think recruiting is similar. So I think as a designer or user researcher or anyone in the tech field, I think we all have stories about working with recruiters that either seem like they didn't really care or they seem incompetent or they at times might seem downright malicious.
- They're doing things that are damaging to my prospects or mental health or just generally in a way that you would not want to be treated. And that's part of the reason why I went to recruiting because I thought, Hey, as someone who's gone through the ringer who's worked with many recruiters who's worked in tech and in design for several years now, I could potentially do things a little bit differently. And as I embark on this more and more, I started to realize that okay, this is why it's done this way, not because people are jerks, but because the system pushes them to act this way due to the constraint of time, energy, just your memory space and your ability to mentally prepare yourself and to be patient. So all of a sudden I realized, hey, I want to do things this way and this is exactly how most recruiters do it, and that helps me understand why the system is the way they are.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, I was going to ask you about that because Tom Scott, who's one of the most successful US-based design recruiters, or at least I understand is once said to you, and I'll quote him now, Hang, do you want to be a recruiter for a week? Happily pay you to do this? A lot of the stuff you talk about, recruitment is utter nonsense. Now you are on the other side and you've just been touching on this fact that you see and you've started to do things differently. So what was Tom write about? What is he write about that you were saying that was nonsense? How have you seen things differently now that you are what you used to critique?
- Hang Xu:
- Yeah, first of all, Tom, you're right. Tom is one of the top best UX recruiters out there in London in the us and he's phenomenal. I think he's also very young. I think he's in his twenties, so he's definitely knocked it out of the ballpark, maybe might be like early thirties now. But in his years of recruiting, I think he's one of those folks who just kind of went above and beyond the trajectory. And at the time we were arguing over something called pre-closing. And pre-closing is the technique or the process where a recruiter get a verbal confirmation from the candidate after they've extended the verbal offer. And from a candidate side at the time I thought this is a terrible way of negotiating with people because the power dynamic has shifted in such a way where candidates are highly motivated to say, yes, I will take this offer before they even see the written offer, before they really think through what they would like to ask for because they're receiving this super exciting news that they received an offer.
- And I've helped many friends of my negotiate their salaries, and there are times when they come to me after they've agreed or they accepted the verbal offer, that kind of puts them in a position where it's really hard to go back in and ask for a little bit more money because now you've already said yes. You don't want to come across somebody who is negotiating bad faith. So overall to me, I mean even to this day, I understand why pre-closing happens now better than I did before then, but I would still argue that it's not the most fair technique for you to treat your candidates with because it is a sales technique at the end of the day. And we can go into it as to why I feel this way or what the process is like versus not using it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Well, tell me, other than expediency, what is the reason for recruiters using it? You mentioned it's a sales technique, so maybe there's a bit of pressure there being applied to the candidate to lock them off to other options and hold them to being consistent with themselves, not going back and negotiating in bad faith as you've suggested, but what have you learned about it now that you see it from the side of the recruiter?
- Hang Xu:
- I think the most interesting thing about recruiting, and by interesting, I mean horrible thing is that you can, well, depending on how you look at it, I think to some people they really like it. Even when you do everything, even when everything goes super smoothly and you're just at the top of your game, you're seeing all the right things, you're doing all the right things and you're finding the right people, the hiring manager is great, everything's great, and you're ready to close down this row. You have about 30, $40,000 of commission riding on the line. Anything can happen. That's a scary thing. Or really that's the exciting thing about recruiting because you can do everything and things can still fall apart. So really what you want to do is to make sure that everyone's committed, no one's getting cold feet at the last second, and people are consistent, and this gets closed as soon as quickly as possible because the longer you wait, the more likely that else can happen. Another recruiter can come in, the candidate could extend another offer that's competing with you, or they might get a counter offer. Anything can happen and the sooner you can get everyone to agree to sign, the less likely that something you can pop in and change the course.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You talk about how collective supply that your candidate centric and that, and I'll quote you again now that you say we ensure the interview process is ethical, transparent, and respectful. So thinking about this example of pre-closing, what is a more ethical, transparent, and respectful way of approaching this situation?
- Hang Xu:
- A lot of things, and this is where it gets really difficult because what is ethical? And that's something that's highly subjective. I think if you were to ask a recruiter what is ethical, I think their answer might be a little bit different. And for me, I've been slowly oscillating between all the different things that I should do in terms of my process, in terms of how I treat and communicate with candidates. So for me, originally the baseline was you should always give feedback when people ask for it. And I think I'm uniquely positioned in that because I'm a designer, I can understand somewhat better than most recruiters in terms of what is working in their portfolio, what's not working, what kind of design experiences do they have and what might they need more of that. And also being honest with the candidate in terms of what are the challenges or the red flags you're picking up.
- Because I've been in roles where the recruiter told me, Hey, this is the best job ever. You, you're going to love it. They oversaw a lot of things. And then when I step in and around three weeks later I realized, hey, this is not at all what was described. And the worst was when I was talking to two other people that I started working with around the same time that went through the same recruiter and they told me this recruiter told them the exact same thing word for word in terms of how great the company was. It was just a spiel. It wasn't anything based on their knowledge of the company. So I want to do that as much as possible, and that's really difficult to do because at the end of the day, the company or the hiring manager is the customer. They're paying for the match, and the candidate really, to be honest, is the product. They're like a Facebook user, they're getting the service for free, but really they're in a way being sold to the company or the hiring manager and then the recruiter gets paid. So it's a very challenging system to navigate in a way where you feel like you're treating the candidate fairly and ethically. And that's the part where to this day, I'm still really struggling with what is the right amount of information to tell, and I believe I've erred on the right side so far.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, give us an example. What's a situation where you have wrestled with just how much to disclose to the candidate?
- Hang Xu:
- So for me personally, whenever I interview at a place to the point where I'm in final rounds, I'm about to receive an offer that one of the first things I do is I go on LinkedIn, I look for all the past designers that are no longer there at the company and I hit them up, get them to talk to me, pay them if I have to, because I feel that the opportunity cost of that is so much higher than whatever amount that you'd be paying for that. And you learn a lot that way. You learn about the challenges and all the messed up things that can happen or the good things. And I think that's paid a lot of dividends in my process, and I still do that for recruiting and I learned a lot of things. I'm just like, okay, what parts do I tell?
- Right? Because you are learning from one party and you obviously cannot take that information to the other party. So you're hearing the story from one side and you have to really think about why is that person telling you that story? Is that person credible? Is there an axe to grind and maybe it is that person's fault. So you are trying to juggle all these things and then you're trying to figure out how does this apply to the candidate you're working with? So right now, the way I do it is to tell them, Hey, I spoke with the previous designers, the PMs, whoever, and I feel like this role might be challenging for these reasons. And I kind of give a more generalized view of why it might be challenging. And these are typically common things, especially for startup founders, ones who've never worked with designers before. So they might have a very skewed view of what design is and how early on as you try to build trust and report with them, you might have to do a lot of visual designs to get to that point where you feel comfortable talking about strategy, pushing back and doing things a little bit differently.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It sounds like what you are doing, albeit possibly is a greater amount of work than some of your contemporaries might be doing. It's actually helping to set, depending on what you convey, it's helping to set the candidate up and the client for a more successful working relationship, which in turn, I would imagine plays back into your own self-interest. Because from what I understand here in New Zealand anyway, there's usually a clause where if a candidate let go within say six months of being placed for reasons of performance that the recruiter has to replace that candidate at cost to themselves, it's almost like you are helping to manage that relationship and manage that risk through disclosing some of the things that people should be mindful of.
- Hang Xu:
- Yes and no. So in the United States, it's typically three months and it covers everything with the exception of layoffs. So even if the designer leaves because they disappeared one day or they took another job or they got fired or whatever it is, as long as it's not a layoff, then you are responsible or you're going to refund the client or have to redo the search. But generally speaking, I don't think being super honest and straightforward with candidates really has an effect on the three months guarantee because every single time that I, and I've seen it with other people as well, when they fall into a role that is not what they expected it to be, and it's not ideal. You're not going to just run after one or two months simply because it takes a while just to go through the interview loop again. And also you don't want that on your resume because people have been, prior to the mass layoffs, people were concerned that you don't want to be seen as job hopper and you tend to stay the whole year at the minimum
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What we do to keep up appearances. Well, let's talk about something that's tangential to the mass layoffs, and that is, I suppose, candidate ethics. We've been talking about recruiter's ethics, and it sounds like, I wouldn't say your poll is shifting, but it's almost like you are having to finesse the way in which you apply your ethics given the incentives that are in play in your new chosen profession. But just coming back to candidate ethics, now you've said recently, and I'll quote you again, companies that rescinding offers left and right. At this point, I no longer feel comfortable telling someone to follow through on their word when a company won't even do that themselves. I'm telling everyone, do what's best for you. Now, that sounds very Machiavellian, very dog eat dog, very offense is the best defense. Do you still hold that position? Do you still hold that view?
- Hang Xu:
- I do. I do still hold that view because I don't blame companies necessarily. Well, no, I blame the companies because they're lobbying for these laws, right? They at will, at will employment at the end of the day benefits employers straight up, and that allows them to do things or go back on their word when it benefits them. And you're talking about major companies that reconnect or pull back offers due to no fault of the candidate when it suited them financially. I think these are quite devastating to the candidates, especially people who are on H one B visas or who landed an internship and waited several semesters for this opportunity and now they have to scramble. These are potentially devastating things on people's livelihoods and their families. It's unfortunate. So often we, and I felt this way before with other recruiters where you are kind of pressured to do the right things by following through.
- Let's say you accepted an offer and then a week later another company extends a much better offer. And typically you're told, Hey, you already agreed to this and you want to hold true to your word. You have your reputation to focus on. And I used to be of the belief that that is true. You should hold yourself to your word. You're going to have to take that financial hit, get paid a little bit less and say no to this other opportunity. But after what we saw with some major companies pulling offers these mass layoffs, I don't think that's really the case. And one of the biggest reason is if companies really wanted to lock candidates down, they can offer contracts that stipulate what would happen if either side were to pull out, but they don't because at will employment is so much superior to them, it's so much more value to them.
- So why do we hold ourselves to these high exacting standards? Yet companies can do these things and in many ways hurt us way more than we can ever hurt a company. So I could Rene on an offer with a company and not show up to work, and the worst thing for them is, okay, their projects are going to be delayed a little bit and they have to restart their interview cycle, which pain in the ass? I totally get that. But there stock pricing is going to take a hit. They're still going to be able to pay their rent and everything. Whereas what's been happening to the candidates and employee side is it's way worse.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You asked the question and then moved on from it. Why should we hold ourselves to that higher standard of ethics of being consistent with what we have said we would do? I'm interested in your thoughts on why it is that we feel like we should do that as employees
- Hang Xu:
- Because there's the standard professionalism. I would even say this is ethics, right? We're all acting within the boundaries of the law, which is you sign an at will job offer, both sides can pull out at any point. One of the biggest misconceptions that I'm seeing that I've seen is candidates feel that once they sign an offer, like physically sign a DocuSign or their signature, that means the offer is locked down. The company cannot go back on their word, and that is not true at all. Companies can decide to not hire you or go and cancel the hiring or fire you for any reason or no reason at all. So if that's the case and that's totally legal, they don't need to be penalized for it in any way unless it's discriminatory against the protected class, then why shouldn't candidates be allowed to say, Hey, I received another offer that's significantly more, that's more secure, that's better for my family even though I've already signed the job offer for this company.
- I'm going to have to take this other opportunity. And I think for the longest time, we've just been pressuring candidates to not do something like that because it's seen as unprofessional, like you're burning bridges and you're creating a bad reputation for yourself. But honestly, with the way how large tech companies have laid people off again and again the last year or two, I don't think they're going to see any major repercussions from that. I think people will still go back to Coinbase, Microsoft Meta for the money, and I don't think they're going to be held to a different standard. I think if they're not going to see any repercussions from it, why should we as candidates see repercussions to our career for doing virtually the same thing?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There's been no crime committed here, right? This is what you're talking about. It's completely illegal for companies to rescind signed offers. And so you are suggesting that because of that, it should be perfectly acceptable for candidates to do the same in effect if they get a better offer. There's also this interesting conflation between what's legal and what's ethical. And those two things are clearly not always aligned, and particularly not in this case, depending on how you define your own personal set of ethics, but people can quite easily be inconsistent with what they would talk about as being professional behavior when it's expedient and financially and their benefit to act a certain way.
- Hang Xu:
- I don't really see this as ethics in a way. It's more of, I mean, it's always been legal to do these things, to pull offers, to lay people off. It's always been legal for the last several decades, if not centuries, but we haven't seen it in recent memory. And if that's happening, it doesn't really make sense for us to go out of our way to not do the same when it's beneficial to us because it just doesn't seem fair. I wouldn't even say it's ethical. It's more just fairness at this point. If this is how I could be treated, why would I anticipate anything different?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I suppose that's a question that everyone listening is going to have to come to their own answer with and decide to behave in a way that they are individually comfortable with behaving. But I think what you're saying is really valuable to bring to people's ears because it does raise that specter of doubt as to whether or not on the labor side of things, we've been getting a Aurora end of the deal and holding ourselves to higher standards than perhaps the people who are extending the employment offers are holding themselves to. Let's talk about the current state of the market. You've been doing this since late 2022. You've seen the layoffs in tech in 2022 and this year as well. How would you describe the arc of the market, of the employment market, of the labor market for design and for tech that you've seen in that time? And where are things currently at?
- Hang Xu:
- I started right when the layoffs happened or layoffs started with Lyft and Uber as one of the first ones. So that timing on my part for sure, I could have time to market a little bit better. I think one reason why it looked so terrible was more than a year ago, back in, I would say late 2021 and maybe early 2022, the market was amazing for candidates, and I remember seeing everyone changing jobs and seeing a 20, 30% bumping salary. I think the statistics at the time was that if you change jobs on average, you were seeing a 9.1% increase in salary, and if you stayed at your job, you were seeing a minus 1.9% or something like that. Don't quote me. So due to inflation,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Right?
- Hang Xu:
- That was such a great time for candidates, which obviously was not sustainable, but we careened from side to side very violently. So we went from that very high top of the mountain all the way to this valley. It was kind of shocking. I think people's attitude and people's mentality changed a lot. You went from negotiating salaries very aggressively as a candidate, knowing that you can ask for a lot and you're able to pit companies against each other. You're able to start a conversation with, okay, what are you paying? What's salary range? Even before the salary transparency loss kicked in for New York City all the way to candidates who are more cautious and less likely to ask about salary until much later in the interview process and then feeling like they can't really negotiate or ask for very much. I think I shouldn't say this because I'll jinx it, but it felt like February to April were pretty awful, and hopefully that was in the dear and we're now rebounding, but you never know.
- I don't think anyone can predict what the next few months will bring. But it does feel like in May, June and July, things were starting to pick up again. So we're more hopeful for sure, but I'm still not seeing a lot of user researcher roles and content design and all the more uncommon roles that were very much part of the hiring spree in 2021. So I think that's the area where it's still not great and where a lot of user researchers with very good experience are still struggling to get interviews and to line a job.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What do you suspect that's symptomatic of why those roles aren't coming back on your radar?
- Hang Xu:
- I can't say for sure. I think my initial perception was that when the layoffs started, companies were one cutting roles. They were also reducing hiring plans for next year. And as a hiring manager, you're probably thinking, Hey, originally I was going to get a headcount of six people for the three product lines that we have that I'm in charge of. And with six people, I can probably hire three designers and three researchers. So now part of the agile team, you have a designer and a researcher that six headcount has been reduced to one or two. And if you're going to hire one or two designers or one or two UX professionals, you're probably going to go for a designer who can do a little bit of everything. You need that flexibility since you only get one headcount. And as a result, even at the worst, I think if you were a strong visual designer with some experience in building products from zero to one, dealing with complexity, a little bit of research, you could still find jobs out there. There were still staff design positions open at certain large companies, but everything else at the time seemed almost nonexistent. And even now it's only solely starting to pick back up again.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, for those people that are out there interviewing or have been interviewing for a while, some of them and everyone listening at some point in the not too distant future will probably find themselves interviewing. Let's talk about salary negotiation. Let's talk about that part of the process now. I want to start though by picking up on something that I've heard you talk about, which is that salary negotiation is actually something that happens before the topic of salary is first raised. And about this, you've said, and I'll quote you again, when it comes to salary negotiation, it's always happening. There are all these things that you are doing that you think aren't really related to it, and they absolutely are. So what are those things that are happening that people aren't aware of that they need to be mindful of?
- Hang Xu:
- I think first of all, you have to take into consideration what role it is and also what kind of company, how large the company is, if they have salary bands in place, hiring rubrics, leveling rubrics. But generally speaking, if you're interviewing at a company with an established HR team and system and they're hiring a specific level for the designer, then the best way to boost your salary is not to ask for more money, but to exhibit the strength signals that shows that you should be leveled higher, which would then bump you to a higher salary band. And therefore, if that's the case, then really it's not about asking for more money, it's about showing that, hey, you are really, really good at your job. You're going to solve all the problems, the hiring manager, the team and the company are coming across. You're the right person for this, and if they don't hire you, the next best option is going to be way inferior compared to you.
- So again, I think when people think of salary negotiation, they kind of constrain it to the process of asking verbally, asking for more money, saying when you get an offer, you say, oh, I want a little bit more when another 10 20 k more. And they think that's salary negotiation. But I truly believe that if you're looking at this right way, you should be thinking about it not only in terms of the money, but also how you're level and how your career changes and shifts and how you fit into the current hiring. And the job met us out there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've also talked about how by the time the offer is presented to the candidate, it's often too late to influence or adjust where they've pegged you in the leveling for that organization. So if we assume that's true and consistent, what can candidates do to positively influence that opinion that those who are interviewing them are having of them as they go through the process so that they can be higher than they may otherwise have been if they weren't actively trying to do that?
- Hang Xu:
- So there are obviously exceptions, at least I can definitely come up with two or three exceptions that I know of from friends and coworkers who were releveled after they received an offer, they were unhappy with the conversation range, and they argue successfully that they should actually be the level higher due to the demonstrations of how in the past they were able to meet the asking requirements of the higher level. But it's just a pain in the butt for everyone involved, right? You're basically saying, let's redo this whole process again. And what can they do besides trying to redo the whole process? I think some of the important things that should be done is to analyze the situation. And I think getting releveled is very situational, and it has more to do with what are the alternatives to both parties if they were not able to reach an agreement.
- And that's one of the most fundamental concepts of salary negotiation called bna, which stands for best alternative to negotiate an agreement. And that's how you view or how you analyze and kind of perceive how the other side, well, what they will do and what the results would be if you were to not sign the offer with them. And also what your alternatives would be if you were not to do that or if they were to pull the offer. And by looking at these two areas, you're able to get a better idea of how far can you push, can you ask for that, ask for a higher level. And I think the other thing that's also really important is leveling is highly subjective. It's not a hard science. You can't really just say, oh, this person has five years of experience, therefore the level three, right?
- It's always a range of say, three to five years of experience. And that's a guideline. And sometimes you go out of that area because the candidate is significantly better in terms of demonstrated skills or significantly worse than their years of experience. So it's not a hard science. And my perception that I don't have any hard data on this is that during the hiring spree of 2021, people were being over leveled. Because if you are a company and you have 20 headcounts open and you need those 20 people, you need butts in the seats so that you can get your deadlines met, you're going to hire the 20 best people you can find within a timeframe. So if the field is weaker during that time because of just how many roles that are open and how few candidates there were, then you're going to get a lesser level of talent, lower level of talent, versus now where more than one hiring managers I've come across have remarked they would say, I'm shocked by the level of talent available right now, and we're going to evaluate our options to make sure that we find the best talent available.
- And on the other side, I've heard more than one designer saying it feels like the hiring side or the employers are trying to find a staff level designer who's willing to take a senior level salary.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've got a not so funny but funny definition of salary negotiation, which maybe it ties into, I dunno if it ties directly into what you're saying there about people being over leveled and then expectations not being quite aligned in the current market when people come for roles. But it's definitely plays into perhaps a broader level of inequity that I've heard you talk about and the way in which people get remunerated in particular designers, right? This is our thing here. You've described salary negotiation as the process by which candidates with the same skills and experience get paid vastly different amounts of money. So if candidates have the same skills and experience, what accounts for the vast difference in pay that they receive,
- Hang Xu:
- All the really uncomfortable things that people don't want to talk about, which would
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Be, let's talk about them. How
- Hang Xu:
- I view salary negotiation as similar to poker in some ways where there's a popular saying for poker, you're playing your opponent, you're not playing the cards of something like that. And I do think if you are any decent as the recruiter or as a negotiator on the hiring side, you would be picking up the body language trying to understand how confident somebody might be you're evaluating their other prospects. So one thing that can help a candidate stand out early on in the process is to say, I have competing interview cycles with your top competitors at other fan companies, and I have competing offers later on. So these not only represent competition to the hiring side, but also they represents strength signals. You only get six to 10 hours of time, which is really in some ways not that much in terms of the commitment you're making toward the candidate, but also you want to get as much information as possible.
- So if you know that they're also interviewing at a similar competitor and you understand their interview cycle and you know that this candidate is now level at this amount, and they're valued this much at this other company, that's a pretty reassuring signal that you're probably making the right choice. So as you're picking up all this information, you then make the decision of, should we give this person a little bit more money? Should we push a little bit more? Do we not have to do that? And obviously I'm saying all recruiters are like this. I think there are definitely a lot of recruiters. I'm not saying this is even a bad thing, I just think this is how it could be done in certain situations. There are other recruiters who look at it from a more numerical standpoint, and they make sure that everyone is around the same level.
- They have different ways of negotiating. But I do feel there is a certain number of recruiters out there who will negotiate based on who's in front of them, and they'll make certain assumptions about that person. And then they would negotiate differently. And again, this is very anecdotal, I'll admit, but as someone who's done, I don't know how many interviews at this point and received dozens of offers, I've never once in my career been told that this, there are times when I've asked for more money and they said, sorry, we cannot give you any more. But they never, right off the bat, told me, here's your offer amount and we're not able to increase it anymore. This is the final offer, take it or leave it. And I've never come across that. But oftentimes I've heard that from other people. And I have noticed anecdotally again, that more women hear that than men do,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That it's a final offer, that it's not negotiable.
- Hang Xu:
- Yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's definitely one rabbit hole to go down. And I think we'll come to something like that shortly. I just want to stay briefly though where we are and what you are saying here is actually something that more people need to hear. And if I can just frame that in my own words for us now, you are basically saying that everything, and I'm extrapolating this much wider than just salary negotiation, but everything in life is negotiable. And that there's often the implicit assumption that we place on things like a salary negotiation or a job offer where we don't see that to be true. But you are saying that that is true, right? It's very rare for it to be a final offer, no room for negotiation. But they're not necessarily going to open the door to that and say, please negotiate with us and ask for more money. Either are they
- Hang Xu:
- First? I do think a lot of things are more negotiable than most people would assume. And I also do think that because the interview process is so subjective and there's so much data, so many data points that no one can truly do this in a systematically fair way easily. That there are just so many opportunities to let your biases and your assumptions kind of run amok a bit. And I do think that has an effect on people's salaries. If you were to look at the salary disparities between different racial groups, gender, it's really all over the place. And I think it's only in the last 10 years where women have gotten closer to the same pay rate as men. I think it's been 81, 80 2% for the longest time. And it's things like that where I feel like, okay, yeah, there's something very obviously wrong. I can't really pinpoint exactly where it's happening, but it's most likely to do with people's biases as opposed to the way leveling is set up necessarily. And maybe they probably do go hand in hand.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've had a crack at this before, and I don't know just quite how long ago this was, maybe it's last year or maybe it's earlier this year, but you've suggested that salary negotiation as a practice because we don't have salary transparency, entrenches inequities in the labor market. And you've summed this up by saying Asian and white men are basically taking money from other people by negotiating better, and that is fundamentally unfair. So let's follow that along. So what makes you feel that those individuals from those ethnic groups are responsible for this particular situation? And in this situation, I mean that other ethnic groups or gender groups aren't getting paid as much as them, rather than it being the responsibility of the organizations, for example, that are extending the offers.
- Hang Xu:
- That's a great question. I really need to think about what I'm writing and saying in public next time because that is a very extreme statement that I've made. I think the purpose behind my saying that is one, Asian-American men are probably the highest paid group in the United States, even more than white men. And I think there are certain advantages to being Asian-American and being a white man in that you can probably negotiate for more money. I think people are more willing to say yes to you. It's like, yeah, we'll give you another X amount. And that's seen as in line with their perception or the assumptions about you. And because we get away with that, we're basically making more money and now there is less money to go around. And I think looking at it, yeah, you're right, it's not that clear. It's not that black and white.
- And there are obviously the company is at fault in many ways in terms of how they set up pay equity. That shouldn't happen. But for whatever reason it does happen. And I'm not suggesting that Asian and white men should be held fully accountable for this, but I do think we should be cognizant of this disparity and we should do more to make sure that that's not the case. Even if we benefit directly from it, we should do our best to make sure that other groups can make around the same money as we do, and we should support them in any way we can. Either by making sure that salary negotiation is available or the techniques and the skills and the process is accessible and available to everyone. Are we move toward a system where you don't need to negotiate because in some ways it's kind of a cultural thing almost. It's like tipping. I don't know if it's super necessary to have this in order for us to exist in a society in a functional or optimal manner.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I know you're a big proponent of, or at least you have been in the past of salary transparency, and you mentioned the laws that are coming to New York, and I understand that there was quite a substantial lobby group represented by household names, companies that are household names that were opposed to this. Now about this, you've said again, hopefully this doesn't scare you too much. Me quoting you again here, if I had all the power in the world, I would enforce radical salary transparency. So what is it that replacing our current way of doing with all the salaries, being transparent, what is it that you're hoping we would be able to rid ourselves of?
- Hang Xu:
- I think when the data's out there, then it becomes quite obvious the issues are the systematic or systemic issues that are among us. And really, I should define what is radical transparency when it comes to salaries. But my issue right now with New York City salary transparency law is that it doesn't do enough to enforce or even outline what it means to be transparent. And you have companies that will say, we're paying between a range of $150,000 to $800,000. And that's possible because you're including all the levels from one to seven for this row together. But obviously you have an idea of where you want to hire. And it's probably not level one, and it's probably not level seven, it's probably somewhere like level three to four, three to five. And I think with the amount of effort and work and investment they put into the leveling rubrics that these companies have, you could at least break it down for people a little bit and say, we're hiring between these levels and here are the different responsibilities for these levels, and here are the ranges for each level so that people can have a better idea of how they should negotiate going forward.
- And all the data that we have from studies show that that kind of salary transparency helps with pay equity. So it leads me to think that the more data we have, the more able or likely that we'll move to an equitable society when it comes to pay. It'd be wonderful. It'd be wonderful if companies were to release internal data that they have, that they're already collecting for E L C data that they're giving to the labor department. If they were to release some of that data internally and to say, Hey, here is what we are paying Asian American men, white men across these levels on average, and here's a pay disparity and inequity that we've noticed and here's how we're going to address that going forward. Right now, every large company has that data, but the vast majority absolutely do not want to show that it would just open up a huge can of worms.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I see it being very unlikely that you'll see companies doing that voluntarily. You're running into fundamental challenges around the board of directors responsibilities to the shareholders and what they perceive to be in their best interest versus what you are talking about here, which is a broader social inequity. And the incentives, at least from what I understand, don't seem to be appropriately aligned through regulation or legislation to enable that to happen yet. And I'm not sure if it will without appropriate legislation or regulation. I'm not sure you'll see much movement there, at least not on the behalf of corporates.
- Hang Xu:
- No, and I think this is another opportunity where an HR person can tell me, Hank, do you want to be an HR person for a day? We'll gladly pay you because you seem like you know everything about this. And I'm sure once I get into it I'm like, oh, holy crap. This is why you cannot do that. But the hope is there. And I do think that maybe I'm talking out of my ass in terms of how we would solve it. I do truly believe that we're not doing enough to solve this really important issue and we're just missing all these opportunities because it's too profitable for companies to not address it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm mindful of time Hang, and I also am mindful of bringing things down to the level of the individual and agency that we do hold in the current context in which we are working now. So for my final question today, I'm going to quote you one last time, and it's something that you said recently, which is we should always be pushing for that extra thousand, 2000, 3000, $5,000. So at face value, that seems like a rather, this is an unfair label, but rather small-minded nitty gritty type approach. But it's not, is it? What is the cumulative effect of taking that approach of always going for that next little bit if you can?
- Hang Xu:
- I think going back to my credit card debt and compound interest rates, that money today, a small amount of money, by the way, it's not even small. I think like 2000 to $5,000, that's a vacation right there. You can definitely take a week off. And that's a big deal to people. You could use that money to do any number of things, you can do a lot with it, a lot of good, a lot of things to help your family, your loved ones. So I think that's important. But more importantly, long-term, this money that you make that you would save up can become much larger later on. I think that Business Insider article that I often talk about where they show two people side by side, one person asked for $10,000 more and they got a little bit more of a race every other year. And over time the compounded difference was something like a million dollars.
- Now I'm not saying that by asking for it, you get a million dollars more, but that $5,000 is definitely going to turn into tens of thousands of dollars. And it means that you can retire many months if not years earlier. So you asking for this now technically could become you having extra year to do whatever it is you want to do. And I think that's important. And one of the responses I get from people when they're negotiating salary is, well, I don't want to chances anymore, I don't really want that remaining 5,000. It's not a big deal after taxes, it's only going to be like 3000. It's not a whole lot of money. I don't want to risk anything. And my response is always, yes, that could just be $3,000 now in cash, but later on things could be quite different. And I think we as workers should definitely be looking toward the future.
- And we haven't done that enough. And that's why we've lost valuable things that I hope you folks don't have in New Zealand. Like pensions. We're stuck with 4 0 1 kss. Yeah, we have fund our own retirement, so every dollar counts. And the crazy thing is that I think I'm near the top percentile in terms of salary and I think I've done a good job of saving money, but I remember talking to my wealth advisor at Fidelity and he's like, yeah, you're just not on track to retire by 65 currently. I'm like, how? How's that? Apparently most people are not. So yeah, you got to think about the future
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And the people that most need to hear this are possibly the audience that's not listening to this podcast, which are those designers, those people starting out, the ones that are just at the very beginning of their careers because your advice is excellent advice and it is most fruitful when it's applied early and often. So it's a good place for us to leave our conversation today. Hang, thank you. I've really enjoyed the straightforwardness of our conversation today. You've certainly given people plenty of important things and some controversial things, but rightly so to think about. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today.
- Hang Xu:
- Thank you so much for having me. You asked some really amazing questions. Some of them makes me cringe a little bit, but I did say those things, so it's on me and I really appreciate you digging that up. It's always good to have that retrospective
- Brendan Jarvis:
- A hundred percent. And I like to think that I gave you, and as I give everyone the opportunity to evolve points of view, which I think you did several times, Hang, so it's been my pleasure. As I said, I've really enjoyed our time today. And if people want to connect with you, if they want to follow what you're doing with Collective Supply, what is the best way for them to do that?
- Hang Xu:
- I'm most active on LinkedIn, so you can find me on LinkedIn under Hang Xu or I think my LinkedIn name is /haxuco. And if you want to check out Collective Supply, it's at HTTPS something, something black slash collective.supply.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Awesome. Thanks. Hang, and to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Hang and Collective Supply, and also some detailed chapters on all the things we've discussed today in particular. Those will be posted on the YouTube video.
- If you enjoyed this show. If you enjoyed our conversation today and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management and design, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast, subscribe. It'll turn up every two weeks and tell someone else about the show if you feel they would get value from these conversations at depth.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can also find me on LinkedIn. There's a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes, or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.