Growing up in Saudi Arabia, Junaid wanted to be a pilot. But taking computer science in high school put him on a different path. When he immigrated to the US he took computer science and took a lot of networking classes. Lead by his curiosity, he was always tinkering. Listen in as he tells Jonaed about building computers, graphic design and ultimately how he became a User Experience & User Interface Designer.
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Jonaed: Welcome to the 44th episode of the No Degree podcast. Today's guest is Junaid Ahmed. Junaid immigrated to the US at 19 years old in the mid-90s. He started his career working on websites. He then got experience with servers. He worked for both small businesses and corporations. He made sure to learn as much as he could. He's the host of the Hacks & Hobbies podcast.
He always dabbled in photography as a hobby. He combined his background in tech and his photography hobby to become a UI/UX designer. Listen to follow Junaid’s journey. Subscribe to our Patreon@patreon.com/nodegree. Every contribution is appreciated. This show is impossible without you. Let's get this show started. Hey Junaid, can you give an introduction of yourself?
Junaid: Hey Jonaed, how do I say your name again?
Jonaed: Oh, mine, I go by Jonaed, but you can call me Junaid. You're close enough. We’re name brothers. It’s hard to find…
Junaid: We’re name brothers, exactly. What’s funny is that you had a different spelling and then I was like, “Hey, this is pretty cool connecting with you.” So, a little bit about myself. I started as a user experience designer almost a decade ago. But before that I was designing graphics for the web and being very associated with the technology space. Been doing that for over two decades and it's been a ton of excitement. So I'm not sure where to start, but…
Jonaed: I mean, that's a good start.
Junaid: That's a good start. All right.
Jonaed: Before we take it back, what does a user experience designer do? What do you do in your day job?
Junaid: Oh, great question. So, user experience designer is somebody who designs an experience using UI and customer journey and figuring out how do we solve a problem what somebody is facing and it's mainly design the user interface as associated very closely with web applications, mobile applications and in the space of enterprise. So I am focused on creating enterprise applications and figuring out the user experience of what's the day-to-day this guy is going to do and how are they going to be interacting with this design? I want to make it as intuitive as possible.
Jonaed: So, these are like employee log-ins. If they want to check how many vacation days they have, or they want to check something, they want to pull some data, that type of stuff?
Junaid: That type of stuff as well as think about you are, let's say submitting your timecard or your reporting. This incident happened and you're doing analytics. You're doing a bunch of work together in different tabs, but what's one place that all of this information makes sense, then you're doing reporting on it. So all of that is encompassing in UX design.
Jonaed: Let's take it back. What did you want to be in high school?
Junaid: In high school, I didn't know what I wanted to be, but before I got introduced to computers, I always wanted to be a pilot. I wanted to fly planes because I wasn't very close to technology. Only at a point that, okay, tech is there, and we have a television, we have a telephone, I wasn't too involved. And I do remember my neighbor at the time had a Commodore 64 and he let us borrow it.
So I played on it and you know, I was like, okay, this is pretty cool. And eventually we got an Atari and then I think my dad got us our very first computer in ’92 which is a 486 and having a computer at home totally changes the perspective. When you're so close to something, it starts affecting how you think, how you work things.
And what's really cool is having close proximity to any technology gives you an edge like none other. For example, Bill Gates had access to a computer that even the engineers that were assigned to this computers didn't have access to it past the eight hours that they were required to work on. Bill Gates had free reign to this computer and he would just program 24 hours a day.
That's what enabled him to even create the operating system that IBM then bought from him. Having close proximity to technology enabled me to be more tech savvy, more curious of, hey, how does this work? Why is this thing moving on the screen when I moved the mouse?
Jonaed: Wow, nice. So, that was definitely at a young age. The pilot that you want to become that now I know you did a lot of graphic design and all that stuff. How did that sort of get into your life?
[0:04:57]
Junaid: When we had the first computer, I was like, all right, this is cool. I learned some programming language, like Turbo Pascal and whatnot. I practiced it on the computer. We didn't even have a mouse when we had this computer. The mouse came a little later. There was no sound, there was no CD. It was just a plain desktop keyboard and a monitor. It was so janky, right?
Jonaed: And what year was this again?
Junaid: This is ’92. I think they had sound cards around this time, but we just went with a base model and that's what we had. When I came to the US in ‘95, the computer technology had gone up a notch and I was like I need to get a computer because that's what it's all about. I got involved with computers, playing with, breaking them up, playing on it, connecting with people through AOL, SMS, Ginger, and AOL and email with Juno.
But what really got me involved into graphic designing is this playing with the software that's on there, like Microsoft Word and Excel and whatnot. At this time, my uncle was running a small business and he needed some flyers made. I fired up Microsoft Word and I started designing a flyer. This is in ‘96-’97. It was just too much fun because also going to college, I was interning, not literally interning, but assisting at the writing lab so we've got to play with different software on the computers.
Again, being in close proximity really helped designing for using Microsoft Word, then upgrading to Front Page when I started designing web pages and Dreamweaver, Photoshop, you name it. All these applications started coming into view and I started using it and applying what I had learned through college and what I have learned through just tinkering around, enabled me to get to that point.
Jonaed: Nice. How old were you when that happened?
Junaid: When I came to the United States in ‘95, I was 19 years old. Let me back up a little bit. While I was in Saudi going to high school, I picked, so I went to Pakistan Embassy school. Our high school ends at 10th grade and then after that, we have two years of interim college where you get to pick or, hey, do you want to do bio or medical or do you want to do computers and electronic sources? Those were the two options I had. I ended up being in computer science and we had a great teacher. He taught us a lot about computer science and programming. When I came out here, I already had my mind made up. I'm going to do something with computers. When I was going to college, I was like, okay, let me take some networking classes.
My idea was, I'm going to do computer information systems as my major. Going through that, it took a ton of different classes on networking, programming languages and playing around with these things. But I was just always experimenting, tinkering and having a computer at home totally helped. I was 19, around when I turned 20-21, I was designing graphics, using Microsoft Word and all those, you know…
Jonaed: You could do that? Well, I guess you could. I've seen people do crazy things in just Microsoft Paint.
Junaid: Absolutely. I think after Microsoft Word, Microsoft has something called the Publisher, Microsoft Publisher. I started using Publisher because I had more control over the margins, more control over what I can drop in there. In fact, my first website that I designed was in Publisher. Anyways, that was a ton of fun going through that part of my life, learning about tech, learning about designing. I also worked at a computer shop where I got to build computers for a living.
Jonaed: Nice. Nice. How was that? Can you talk about building the computers for a living?
Junaid: That was a ton of fun. I mean, based on what the customer needed, again, a little bit of UX comes into here because UX is all psychology. You're asking a question, you’re figuring out, “Okay, what's your problem? How can we solve it with this solution? Okay. How fast the computer do you need? Well, what are you going to be doing on this computer? Are you getting to be to building pages? Are you going to be using Microsoft Office?” Pretty simple.
Taking in account to those, how much money do you want to spend it? What's your budget. Based on that, we would pick the CPU, the motherboard, the RAM, the hard drive space. You need CD. Do you have built-in sound in those motherboards? I don't think so, separate sound cards, separate video card. Assembling all of that together, and we had some pretty cheap parts to build these computers. That's pretty fun.
Jonaed: How long did you work at the computer shop?
Junaid: Probably six months to nine months, I worked for a computer shop and then I moved to a web hosting company where I started doing the actual web design work for other clients, small businesses.
[0:10:04]
Jonaed: Now you got into web design because you had the graphic design background. How was that? And how did you get better at it over time?
Junaid: Just experimenting the different layouts. There's a ton of Smashing Magazine, it’s actually something pretty new. There was a website called Designs by Mark, This is Mark. I can't even remember his name anymore, but he had a website where he talked about Photoshop tutorials and he would teach you all the different techniques you can use in Photoshop while you're designing Zapps. I think I was following Macromedia. Macromedia and Adobe were two separate companies.
Macromedia had Fireworks, Freehand and Dreamweaver. Photoshop had the Illustrator and – sorry, Adobe had the Photoshop and Illustrator software companies. I was going back and forth between Photoshop and Fireworks at that time. In fact, I was using Fireworks up until seven years ago, still, to design mobile applications and enterprise level obligations.
Jonaed: How long did you keep that job?
Junaid: Kept a job at the hosting company for about a year, till I, again, moved to another company. This was a smaller company. This was actually a little larger company because the hosting company was only myself as a designer and then we had the CEO who managed all the hosting platforms or the servers, which also inspired me to launch my own hosting company around that time.
I created my company Humblezone back then and offered hosting and still do. From then I switched to another company where we did a lot of different things. We were supporting hotels, video on demand services. They had servers set up. Again, I had gained experience not only in web design, but also on how to set up servers, how to set up an intranet and network with server and backups and whatnot. Taking all of that tech and knowledge that I had, I took to this new company called SatLink, I think the name was. it was fun. We were supporting and helping these hotels like these small mom shop hotels on setting up video on demand services. It was just neat. It was just really, really cool.
Jonaed: How long did you stay at this job?
Junaid: I think about three years.
Jonaed: Three years. What kept you at this job longer than the other ones?
Junaid: This job gave me a lot more flexibility and a lot more challenges. I was able to travel all around the world, all around the US, actually, different hotels that we service and make sure the system was up, working in optimal. From that company gave me a lot more freedom on what I could do and what I could work on. We created a lot of different brand and products. It was just a ton of fun.
Jonaed: You really learned a lot about servers and all that. So this was, I guess, really important for you as a tech person, knowing that info very important. What came next?
Junaid: What came next is around towards the end of the company, the company, they were partnering with another company to help them upgrade the tech that they were using. They had a bunch of contracts already, and they were enabling them to set up the systems. I moved to the next company that we had partnered with like, hey, I can help you deploy these systems further and let's go and do it.
So, in the middle, there was a lag where basically I was just working out of home, designing websites. One of the contexts from this new company, Oxford Media at the time, they were like, “Hey, we need a website done and I know you're the guy to do it. So let's do it.” I was actually looking for a full-time gig, but I was like, let's see if I can go and help them.
I was driving, I had a phone interview with another company and I was driving and I called this guy up like, “Hey, can I come over? We can talk a little more about your website and what we can do there.” He's like, “Sure, sure. I was just about to call you to see if you could come on in.” This was February of 2007. I'm sorry, February 2005. Driving to our Irvine, I showed up to their office and they basically showcased entire office that they had and the new tech they were getting from Korea and how it's going to change the video on demand services, where people can simply just use a remote control to control our server on the back end and be able to load up a movie on demand. I was like, whoa, this is pretty neat and this is before Netflix and before all of that stuff happened, we didn't have streaming. We had to set up servers local on a network to be able to deliver the content.
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So, I went and visited the office and it was pretty sparse, there was a ton of cubes. It looked like they had just moved into the place. I went and talked to the CEO there and he's like, “So, this is what we've got going on. So, what's up?” I was like, “Well, I wanted to come in and see if I can design your website and maybe I can come in here and be close to you guys as I'm designing your site and whatnot.”
So he's like, “Oh, I don't know if you have any space over here, but I'm sure we can find some space.” You know, just jokingly. On the spot he hired me and brought me on because I was proactive and I was talking to my strengths rather than what weaknesses I have. Now, mind you, I still don't have a degree in any of the things that I talked about.
Jonaed: Did they ever ask? In tech, I know they're pretty forgiving. Did they ask? Did that ever come into?
Junaid: They did not ask. No.
Jonaed: Yeah. They just cared that you really had the knowledge and stuff. So now this is like around 2005. How long did you work with this guy?
Junaid: Here in this company, we had a pretty good setup. There was a whole team there. There's marketing, sales, there's all different departments. I worked here for about two and a half years and the way that it ended was because while the company went public, I was traveling and then I did a lot of the onsite set up and did all the website work, graphic design, branding and everything.
But towards the end, what happened is we had a CEO change. They went public and I am an open guy. I was basically keeping in touch with the previous CEO as well. What happened is the previous CEO was like, “Hey, I need some help with our website. Can you come help me?” I'm like, “Absolutely. I would love to.”
I had printed the directions on the company printer and the current CEO at the time saw the directions. I didn't know, I was confronted about it the next day. Like, “Hey, why did you go see this guy?” I'm like, “Oh, nothing. Just, you know, just catching up and keeping in touch.” Hours later I was fired or I was laid off because I was having communication with the ex-CEO.
What's really funny is that when I was hired on two years ago, the CEO had signed me up to be a founder so the contract that I was signed on was a founder contract. Meaning that they still have to pay me for the next 60 days before I’m let go. So I was like, “Hey, I don't have to be here, but you still got to pay me for the next two months.”
Jonaed: That's always nice.
Junaid: That was nice and then immediately after I started working for the company that was below the same office building, there was two floors and there's another company on the bottom floor that needed some help with web design, some graphics and whatnot. So I was like, “Hey, I’ve already been driving out here. I'll just come visit you guys instead.” So that was pretty fun.
Jonaed: When you went to get the job a few floors below, did you apply or you just went and talked to that person?
Junaid: I think I applied, I just don't remember all the details. It just happened. I worked there for like two months and then I went and worked for the old CEO that I was working with.
Jonaed: Okay. So what did you do with the old CEO?
Junaid: The old CEO was running another company. He was actually working on Y Max. We heard about Y Max a way back and it's basically similar to 5g that we have now been launching. Y Max was another way to get internet access to you, line of sight and faster than the T1 lines that people were experiencing. They were running a network operating system, a NOC, basically a network operations control center. They needed my assistance with some of that stuff and I just got too busy not only just designing the website, but also tinkering what some web tech dealing with PBX, telecoms and whatnot.
I think three months later, the CEO is like, “Well, you're not really doing everything that we're asking because you know, you're split between many different tasks that we're giving you, but we need the site done.” I was like, “Well, I'm not sure what to tell you.” I can't remember, but I basically got let go because the CEO didn't feel like I was doing everything. Plus they were having problems because they couldn't land enough clients and land enough sales for a company at the time to keep moving forward.
[0:20:05]
Jonaed: Okay. So now you got let go. What year is this about?
Junaid: I think this is 2007.
Jonaed: Okay. So now what came next?
Junaid: 2007, I was unemployed for a couple of months. What did I do after that? It's a good question.
Jonaed: Well, what do you remember doing?
Junaid: I remember that I was applying -- oh yeah, at this time, my cousin and his good friend were running a company called Centric Media and they were helping small businesses launch different products. We were always talking about ideas, always talking about solutions. It was just a really fun environment and he had just set that up, this in 2007. I was like, “Hey, I want to come and hang out with you guys and see what I can do, helping with you guys and whatnot.” I basically went there, started doing a lot of freelance work, a lot of freelance design, and also assisting them with coming up with solutions for their clients.
They were always having small businesses come in and figure this thing out. At the same time, I'm also applying for a new job. I got picked up by a company that was also local, Web Visible. I think I had a couple of interviews with these guys and they brought me in. They were like 140 people at the time when I joined and the vibe there was super, super amazing. I've been following Tony Robbins and his enthusiastic ways along the way so I was very positive, very enthusiastic all throughout my career. People saw that and they saw the energy that I brought so they hired me to come in as a UI designer. I went there and worked there for quite some time.
Jonaed: How was this experience for you and what did you learn from this experience?
Junaid: I think this was one of my first experience into a corporate environment because this is the largest company I had ever worked for. Actually not correct. I did work for a manufacturing firm for about a month and I was in basically this room where boards would come out of the machines with chemical bats and you have to like move them from one chain to the other chain. After one month I was like, I don't think I'm doing this.
Jonaed: Yeah. Okay, cool. So, now you obviously had a lot of small business experience and even manufacturing is pretty different. How was this corporate experience because there's some things that are just a little different in corporate.
Junaid: In this company, what was really cool is the level of openness they have. They were a small advertising company that helped local businesses launch ad words campaigns, and their goal is to help these guys get promoted, have their landing pages. Anything you think about around ad campaigns or paid out networking and whatnot. That's what these guys were doing.
I got to play with technology on the backend side, enterprise level side, and around the same time the iPhone was coming out. So I got more and more influence and this is where the product manager told me, “Hey, you should check out this design practicum course by Cooper University up in San Francisco.”
I was like, “All right, I'll check it out.” I went there for a five day course, all around interaction, design practicum. Now you're like, what is that? Well, interaction design is what user experience is called because you are literally designing experience that you get to interact with. So this was my official introduction to user experience and I was like, wow, this is epic. This is becoming into 2010 now.
Jonaed: How long did you stay at this job?
Junaid: I was at this job for about two years and five months, total. What happened is towards October of 2010, the company had gone public three months prior and the CEO that they brought in was all about getting the money out of the stocks, even though there's like a vesting period and whatnot.
What happened is somehow the stock was getting diluted, diluted, diluted that the value of the company started dropping. The other thing that they did is they scale the company up to 400 employees by bringing in at least 300 salespeople. Sell, sell, sell. It's like, holy crap, what are we doing?
So the company laid off 110 plus people that first pass and I was one of them. I was like, “All right, this is what we've got to do.” I had made such an impression to the CEO and to the HR and everything that they were like, they had actually given me a MacBook Pro to work in when I was working on location. And they're like, “Hey, we love what you've done for us all this time and really, really, we really hate seeing you go. But if you want, you can take the MacBook Pro with you.” I was like, holy smokes. That's like a $6,000 computer. So I was like, “Ah, that's really cool. But how about you guys give me one of those new Mac, you know, those 15 inch MacBook Pros instead.” They said, “Sure, come by tomorrow and you know, we'll hook you up.”
So I came in the next day, took that MacBook Pro and I was on my way designing. I went back to Centric Media because I was like, “Hey, let's work again on some of these new products that you go to.” I was there for like eight months. I was unemployed and working for myself for about eight months and I continued to apply for new positions and I couldn't find any work locally in California. So I'm like, what am I going to do? I was applying anywhere and everywhere until finally I was interviewed for a job in Denver, Colorado for Dish Network.
I was on the call for like 15 minutes with the hiring manager. I wasn't even sure if it was going to be a cool deal because after so many rejections on interviews, you're like, you know, you give it all you can, the best you can. But it's what it is. I was like, all right, this is cool. I'm going to just keep on going. I was on this interview for 15 minutes. An hour later, the recruiting company called me and was like, “Hey, would you mind jumping on a Skype call with us tomorrow morning?” I was like, “Sure, no problem.”
The next morning, I jump on a Skype call with them on the video call and I'm sitting in front of a computer and they're basically just asking me basic questions. The recruiting company was based out of India. Can't remember the name of them right now, but they're a huge, huge company that basically act as a recruiter and they were one of the main recruiters for Dish Network. So I was on a call and like, “All right, cool. We’ll keep in touch.” So two days later they're like, “Hey, can you fly out to Colorado for your first week at Dish Network?” I was like, “What?” He's like, “Yeah, you’re hired.” I was like, that's insane. So what I've found is anytime I'm being myself, anytime I'm being like not overly…
Jonaed: Trying to impress them. You just kind of be upfront, transparent.
Junaid: Exactly. Being authentic, being transparent. I felt like I've got the job. That's been my experience so far. So, I go to Colorado. I didn't tell anybody that I have a new job. I'll just go visit there. I spent like one week, one or two weeks over there and they're like, all right and I was like, okay, this is legit. We got to move. I come back, me and my wife and my kid, we packed up our car and we just moved cross country. We drove a thousand miles. So that was fun. That was the first time I got to live on my own. I worked there for about three and a half years. It was one of the best experiences I've had in a long time.
Jonaed: What made this experience really stand out? Why was it the best up until that point?
Junaid: The reason it was really good is number one, I really connected with the hiring manager that had hired me because he was very chill, very down to earth. Anytime we had a conversation, he's like, “Junaid, let me talk to you.” We would go out on smoke breaks. Like he would smoke and then have his Monster energy drink and we would just hang out. It's funny. It's like very early on, I set myself up as I'm the UX designer. I'm not the developer. I told everybody I'm not a developer, I'm a designer. I set that expectation ahead enough so the same time that I was hired, another gentleman was hired for this similar position.
And what we did is, we would go on these rides and we would just talk about stuff. I started talking about my experience as a designer and I would showcase all this stuff that I knew. What that did is that put the developer responsibility on the other guy who's brought in on the same position. That was pretty interesting because being able to state that purpose on what you want to do ahead of time really helped me set myself up for success. Plus the team that we built, so what was happening here is we were designing an app for Dish Network that would enable their extensive dealer network to be able to sell products and have a tablet out. Basically they were designing a tablet application that was initially designed by a third party company, and then they wanted to bring all of that in-house.
[0:30:06]
So I had the opportunity to build that app and I just found out three months ago that they're sunsetting that application that I ran well for three years after I had left.
Jonaed: Wow. That's always nice when you do something and it's still going on because I know there's so many things that you work on projects and they sort of die so a new one comes in. Cool. So now you've obviously had a diverse set of jobs and you know a lot, especially in the last five years, a lot for you user experience and all that.
In your mind, what did you do to get ahead? What made you successful? You said one part was that you were always yourself and that's what got you your job, but what are some other things that you did that you believe you did right?
Junaid: Well, I was always curious. I was always learning about the newest technology. I would always talk about tech. I was always like, hey, check out this new CPU tech that Intel's borrowing from AMD. In fact, in 2005, when Intel announced or Steve Jobs announced that, hey, our Mac books are not going to be using Intel CPU's. I was like, wait, what? It just blew my mind and immediately started searching for how to install Mac OS on my PC.
So, Hackintosh, was born. I took the liberty of learning that myself, installing the operating system and tinkering with it or tinkering the hardware to make it work. I was always tinkering with technology and. In fact, they even created a blog called Techno Junkie where we talk a ton about computers and software and the Apple space. I think that also gave me a leap because I was always learning about new tech and how it could be utilized to create new experiences for our customers and clients.
Jonaed: What are some of the don'ts in your industry that you see? You know, tech is always hot, right? I'll go to tech, go build websites, right? What are some mistakes that you see people make and what are some mistakes that you've made looking back.
Junaid: Man, that's a good question that I don't have an answer to.
Jonaed: Yeah. Okay. No, that's fine. What are some general mistakes that you've seen?
Junaid: That's a good question. I mean, the past question was really, really awesome too. I just haven't made a list yet of the mistakes I've made, but a general mistake on any level actually is to not hear or not listen to what the client wants. There's two schools of thought that you're taught in marketing and technology. One is you listen to the customer and deliver what they want and the other one is a Steve Jobs mentality where customer doesn't know what they want. If they didn't know about the car, they would ask for a faster horse, like, hey, I want to get somewhere faster. You can give me a faster horse, right? That's where the car ingenuity came out. Anytime you're able to combine multiple tech, multiple things together, you're thinking outside of the box and setting up constraints to be more creative around what you want on your life.
Jonaed: So I guess it still stems back to, you have to understand what they need, right? Because even if you say like I'm hungry, it means you want to satisfy that hunger. So how do you go? Or I want to travel somewhere faster, right? It's not the horse. It's just the horse helps them travel. So it's kind of going deeper and figuring out -- They're telling you something, but that is telling you about a problem and then you can say, okay, you can solve this problem through XYZ. How has the industry really changed over time?
Junaid: Now which specific industry are you talking…
Jonaed: Oh, just in general, the tech space, right? You went through the.com bubble, the financial crash and now obviously the tech industry has started going up again due to the pandemic. How has the industry changed over time? I know like now cloud is a big thing.
Now you're not going to have hotels having their own server. It's going to be all in the cloud, do all that. But you know, they go through shifts. I see in a couple of years, their private servers start coming back to host sensitive data. How has the industry changed over time based on what you've seen, going from the ‘90s to today?
Junaid: What's funny is that we've had the cloud since the ‘90s, right? Being able to get to the website, they just gave it a marketing spin around it to call it something that's easily digestible by the consumer, you know, the lay man terms, because technology has changed in that we have some of the greatest minds using machine learning and artificial intelligence. Now, even that is way far beyond to where Skynet is a big threat.
[0:35:01]
We're still building blocks on how AI is working. So technology has definitely evolved. We have new tech, such as blockchain, machine learning and AI to alleviate some of those problems that we had initially. For example, single point of failure, no more. Do we have those single point of failure? Because we are creating redundant arrays, recreating redundant site hosting platforms. What I've seen and what really excites me is how combining software and hardware together has enhanced our ability to overcome some of the issues that we've been facing. For example, the latest and one chip that everybody's been talking about that Apple's created.
I was very skeptical last year when people were saying, oh, Apple is going to come up with an ARM CPU. I'm like, why would you put an ARM CPU? I mean, Intel processor’s so much stronger only because I have a limited knowledge around what's even possible. But then the deeper I dug, the deeper I understood. No, they built the platform that they want to run their software on. So absolutely we're able to do what they want to do with the tech that they're creating.
Where are we going to be in the next 10 years? We have virtual reality. We have augmented reality all coming into place where you can even track your eyes. Like there's a whole set of software or hardware that usability testers use or that you can employ to see, hey, where are your eyes traveling when you're checking, when you're playing on your website and what is the need of it? Even in gaming, because there you can use eye tracking software or hardware for gaming, where it makes it instantaneous to connect to your target or attack and whatnot. I just see that evolution and it just blows my mind what's it what's even possible.
Jonaed: Yeah. No, I mean, technology just changed this, man. I remember I had like 2GB of hard drive space on a computer and then when I went to 8GB, I was like, whoa. Now it's like, I have 64GB of RAM and I have whatever, like one terrabyte and upgraded. It's just crazy how technology goes and how we adapt. So, what would you say, over the years, how have co-workers and our managers describe working with you, given you’re not having a degree?
Junaid: They found that my ability to react quickly or be proactive in creating design or creating a solution has been my best quality, I guess I would say. But what's also amazing is that I'm always learning newer and newer things and being able to relate on a human level to the users. Because as a UX designer, we are known or set to be the user advocates. We are using the user centered design philosophy to design for the user and being as positive or as, what's the word escaping? I'll come back to it. It’ll come to me.
Jonaed: Now, what's the typical salary range for the jobs you did and what's realistic, especially now. Throughout your history, what are the typical salary ranges? I mean, it doesn't have to be yours, but just people who did similar things. What would you say, going forward now doing the things you did.
Junaid: I think depending on the level of experience, a UX designer or a designer per se, would bring the salary range, can go anywhere from $36 to $150 to even $200, depending on how high up they go as a UX designer.
Jonaed: So, the lower end is entry-level. What makes you get, you know, break the six figures? What makes you get closer to the $150-$200 as a UX designer?
Junaid: I think the more specialized you are in the area of your expertise in UX, because user experience is an umbrella in itself, where it goes all the way back to the customer journey to customer support, to visual design, to interaction design, to the actual front end development.
So there's a lot of different levels in UX and there's even user research, right? You're doing interviews, you're talking to a ton of people to understand the problems they're facing and analyzing that data and putting it down. The more of that is available you have experienced with, the more flexibility you have into asking for a higher salary.
[0:40:04]
Jonaed: Okay. Do you mind talking about your hobby because you obviously have your own podcast and you have talked about the studio. You have like a multi-camera set up. How did you get into that?
Junaid: Really great question, thank you. Back in 2013, I got an anniversary gift, a Kennedy SLR camera by my wife, mainly because, she knew I was into photography and videography. I've been recording videos since the ‘90s on tape cameras, just capturing different events so I had an eye for video and eye to capture content. From 2013 on, I basically started connecting with a lot of video production houses, video production people and just being in this space of video production.
I've worked on a good number of short films with a crew and being on set, being able to capture behind the scenes video using my camera and the techniques I learned. I even took some courses called Hollywood video, sorry, Hollywood Camera Works, which teach you all about blocking, all about camera shots, all about how close you would need to be or different shots, because there's a close-up shot, there's a medium shot, a full shot, a double shot that they have different terminology in Hollywood that as soon as you hear it, you know exactly how to frame the shot. Bringing that knowledge over to my home, to my studio, I was like, hey, I've got the equipment. I have the gear, it all started even before I started doing or we started working from home or being on zoom calls because two years prior I had started doing podcasting and I was bringing in guests, using the zoom platform and recording conversations. I know I'm sitting in front of a computer and I need to look good and I want to make sure my guests are looking good too.
So what I did is like take all of that and in the back of my mind, it's like, I want to be able to record this video course that I created on camera. What am I going to see? A lot of the time, you'll see, hey, what I'm looking at looks beautiful. But anytime I turn the camera around, I don't like what I see behind me. It's like when you look in the mirror in the bathroom and you see there's a bunch of hooks and your clothes are hanging in there, like, well, that needs to go. How are you going to stage that shot? So, taking all of that into effect into my head space and having the extra time being able to work from home was like, all right, let's set up this stage for myself because I've been setting up stages for others. Well, when we're shooting a movie, you want to be shooting a short film or we’re shooting a documentary. We're setting the stage. You were making sure everything from background is relevant to the conversation and go from there. So I was able to bring that knowledge into creating my own studio.
Jonaed: That's cool. And you also help people like set up their studios, right?
Junaid: Yes. That's a plus thing that's come out of COVID, to be able to help others set up their studios because the more and more zoom calls I was jumping on, everybody's asking, look, dude, how is your camera or your video looking so much better than the rest of us? What's going on? So I would tell them that what I did and how mine is different than everybody else's. They're like, all right, this is something that you should be teaching others how to do.
Jonaed: That's always interesting. Now, can you talk about the Hacks & Hobbies podcast?
Junaid: Absolutely. So two years ago, like I said, I was mentioning earlier two years prior, I was recording conversations on zoom calls. Those were all for my podcast, Hacks & Hobbies. That started as a hobby to document my journey of beekeeping. I was teased at my previous jobs that I had way too many hobbies. What's your new hobby this week, you know, what's going on? I was like, well, I'm going to create a new podcast all around Hacks & Hobbies, and why a podcast?
Well, over the years, I've connected with so many people. One such gentleman reached out to me and told me, “Hey, can you help me create a podcast?” I was like, “Absolutely. I would love to.” Now, the backstory is 2012, I had a podcast called Still Brewing It because we were just talking about ideas, talking about different things. I had some experience creating a podcast. So in 2018, I went into research mode and did all the research that I could for this friend of mine to set up his podcast.
[0:40:03]
And I ran into this app call Anchor. I'm like, holy smokes. This is so simple. It's stupid. Why everybody's not doing it, right? So just then, once we figured out what my first episode was going to be, I jumped in the car. Didn't even have a name for the podcast and I started talking about the first episode. It was ton of fun.
Jonaed: And how many episodes are you up to now?
Junaid: I am at 220 episodes with about 40 more going out before the end of the year.
Jonaed: Wow. That's interesting. Okay. You know002C I only have, what are you? You’re episode 44, I think. This is going to be episode 44.
Junaid: Oh, I’m episode 44, nice. I like that number.
Jonaed: It was meant to be, and you know, I had the pleasure of being on your podcast, so that was always cool. So how would people get in contact with you?
Junaid: They can visit hacksandhobbies.com to find out more about the podcast. Learn more about my journey and why I started the podcast, as well as learn about the different courses that I'm setting up. I've got a podcast beginner's course. I've got a course on setting up your home studio and how to use your smartphone for mobile video production.
Jonaed: Wow. Thank you so much for your time, Junaid. It was a pleasure speaking with you. I know the audience got a lot of value. Feel free to check out the Hacks & Hobbies. It's just a cool podcast, right? You just get a lot and thank you for another episode of the No Degree podcast.
Another great episode. Thank you for listening. Hopefully, this information was valuable and you've learned a lot. Stay tuned for the next episode. This show is sponsored by you. No Degree wants to remain free from influence so that we can talk about the topics without bias. If you think this show’s worth a dollar or two, please check out our Patreon page. Any amount is appreciated and will go towards making future episodes even better. Follow us on Instagram or Snapchat at No Degree Podcast. On Facebook at facebook.com/NoDegreeInc. If you want to personally reach out to me, connect or follow me on LinkedIn @jonaedIqbal, spelled J-O-N-A-E-D, last name, I-Q-B-A-L. Until next time, no degree, no problem. Nodegree.com.
“Yes. You got no degree. No problem. No problem. Any problem we can solve them, we got this. Linked Insomnia keeps us evolving. We’re growing in the knowing. The wisdom is flowing. If you did, you know, now you know where I’m going. If you did, you know, now you know. Let’s sing that again everybody.”
“No degree, No problem. Any problem, we can solve them. Linked Insomnia keeps us evolving. We’re growing in the knowing. The wisdom is flowing. If you did, you know, now you know where I’m going. No Degree, no problem. Any problem we can solve them.”
“Linked Insomnia keeps us evolving. We’re growing in the knowing. The wisdom is flowing. If you did, you know, now you know where I’m going. Yeah”
[0:48:49] End of Audio