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Mike Industries » A running commentary of occasionally interesting things — from Mike Davidson.

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I live in Seattle, work as a Design Executive at Microsoft, advise companies, and invest in startups I love. There is more here. If you’re in tech and you don’t have at least a little career anxiety right now, you are either overly confident or you aren’t paying attention. Engineers are jittery. PMs are jittery. Designers and Researchers are jittery. The simplest way to explain what’s happening is: The assembly layer is going away. The assembly layer has been around since the beginning of digital product development. For engineers, it includes things like writing a function that calls an API and stores the results in a database. For PMs, it includes culling through experimentation data and collecting significant results into a slide deck. For designers, it includes specifying a button hover state for the thousandth time. For researchers, it involves going through open-ended survey results line by line and tagging each result. “White-collar assembly work” is the digital equivalent of al

April 6, 2026 Tips for Designers on Making it Through 2026 to the Other Side If you’re in tech and you don’t have at least a little career anxiety right now, you are either overly confident or you aren’t paying attention. Engineers are jittery. PMs are jittery. Designers and Researchers are jittery. The simplest way to explain what’s happening is: The assembly layer is going away. The assembly layer has been around since the beginning of digital product development. For engineers, it includes things like writing a function that calls an API and stores the results in a d

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