When Josh Shi signed his offer letter with Figma in 2018, he was a fresh college graduate who didn’t pretend to have any grand plan. What convinced him wasn’t a checklist of industry-standard perks—interesting problems, smart people, good culture. It was that everyone he met during the onsite seemed genuinely invested in understanding who he was as a person. That honesty, he says, stayed with him.

Now an engineer on Figma’s design systems team, Shi doesn’t offer his decision as a prescriptive model. Instead, he reflects on what he wishes he and other students had considered before starting a career: not just evaluating companies, but interrogating your own relationship to work. Rather than a set of boxes to check, he proposes a framework of questions—about what kinds of work interest you, how a role lets you develop those interests, and whether your workplace can adapt if those interests shift.

Rethinking the work-life teeter-totter

Much of the common discourse on adult life, Shi argues, is unhelpful. The familiar image of work-life balance—a seesaw with work on one side and life on the other—frames the two as opposing forces in a zero-sum game. That framing is misleading. Work and non-work are interdependent and shape each other, and together, they amount to how you spend your life.

Shi acknowledges the privilege in this perspective. Referring to Toni Morrison’s essay “The Work You Do, The Person You Are,” he notes that thinking of work as a career rather than merely a job is a luxury not everyone has, especially in times of economic hardship. Yet regardless of circumstances, everyone faces the same underlying question: how do we frame work relative to the rest of our lives in a way that allows us to live the way we want?

Learning after the transition

Joining Figma straight out of college gave Shi ample opportunity to grow technically, including his first exposure to full-stack engineering and writing C++ for the web. More valuable, though, was learning what it takes to own features end-to-end: scoping thoughtfully, disambiguating goals, and shepherding an idea from inception to launch.

That growth depended heavily on mentorship—often informal—from colleagues who gave him the room to challenge himself and take responsibility for his work. Many of the people he sat at lunch with during his interview years ago still work at Figma, and he continues to benefit from their expertise.

The company itself has changed since he joined—the product has grown, and Figma has moved to a hybrid remote and in-person model. But the things that originally drew him in, he says, remain true, and he hasn’t stopped learning since arriving.

The case for a hobby

Shi’s one concrete piece of advice for graduates is simple: get a hobby. School was a blur of constant motion, he recalls. Working life, by comparison, was starkly simple, and for the first time in years, he was faced with free time—and at first, he was clueless about what to do with it.

He connects this to a scene in Kafka’s Amerika, where the protagonist, Karl, has just evaded two swindlers and ducks into a hotel office. There, a cook asks him a question that Shi leaves the reader to sit with. He suggests that this freedom initially felt worthless only because he was unaccustomed to having “nothing” as a thing in itself. Once he adjusted, that void became a blank slate for inscribing his own meaning.

Finding the right hobby, he notes, is much like searching for the right job—lower stakes, to be sure, but requiring the same patience to determine what you want to get out of it. It may not be quick or easy, but there’s no rush. As Shi puts it, for the first time in a long time, there simply isn’t one.