I wouldn't look at it as they didn't "like" you. Rarely do people hire based on 'liking.' More often is about 'fit' for the role.

But to answer your question, there is nothing wrong with being a careered IC. That is not a red flag or anything. Employer understands that not everyone wants to be a manager, and when hiring for senior designer, they want people with decades of experience.

I would specialized, though, as a career IC. Be an expert at certain design realm, and you will get paid top money for your expertise and not compete with a bunch of new designers lacking your experience.

Agencies can be fun places to work. But the pay is always terrible (compare to startups and big cos), and the work is always superficial and not fulfilling, unless you are really into making marketing websites 24/7

Thank goodness we have you to highlight highlights of negative comments. Much more useful.

You should consider getting an English tutor. This is something a designer friend of mine is doing, as English is her second language as well.

;)

Their whole thesis from the beginning is designer should code.

Which is a fine thesis, but if I'm gonna code I will do it in the production code base, not in their sandbox pseudo coding/design environment.

I wonder how long they will stick with this thesis because clearly it isn't working. It has been at least 10 years.

IMO, they should have build tools to facilitate design implementation on top of real dev environment. That's something coding designer would actually use.

When I'm onsite for an interview. Usually they request a deep dive into one or two projects, instead of presenting my portfolio again, since they have already seen it. This has been my experience through out my career.

Portfolio decks are more than just PDFs of your portfolio. It has more biographical information about you, your interests, what you studied, if you took a gap year to travel, etc.

And also how you can contribute to X company in Y ways. So it is sales-y, and I've seen similar things on Twitter as threads.

I wonder if it works, and whether to adopt that practice.

Usually, when I am at an onsite interview, and they ask me to show my work. They tend to want to do a deep dive into one or two projects. And not go through a slideshow of all my work, since they have already seen my online portfolio.

I guess it would be nice to have decks for one or two of projects that are deep dives. But I'm still not convinced of a portfolio deck usefulness in that scenario.

Everything. Recruiters emails and call non-stop.

Platforms like Hired, A-List, Woo.io, etc. that matches your requirements with companies in an auction kind of fashion. They focuses on NY and SF.

Job boards like Angellist, Designer News, etc. Always looking for NY or SF designers.

Companies have events/parties where they try to recruit you.

Basically you can walk down the street and get multiple offers for a job.