This is exactly the kind of change that should not get someone hired: a lot of the UX concerns he highlighted are valid, but the net result of his work looked l

This is exactly the kind of change that should not get someone hired: a lot of the UX concerns he highlighted are valid, but the net result of his work looked like "complete redesign" to most folks and hides some pretty important information in the process. The amazing designers that you really do want to find are the ones that will give you the smallest set of improvements that fix UX issues without changing the visual language of the product. If done right, most people wouldn't even notice that the site had changed at all but their daily frustration with being able to find things would decrease. For example, the nested tab mess can be a real annoyance. It's worse on mobile, too, but the designer managed to tweak the design and completely forget about anything other than desktop dimensions. This is not really forgivable in 2018. The least possible change might be: let's try placing all the tabs together on the screen so that people don't go looking in one list for an item that's in the other. Then, making all the pages have the same navigation group containing both sets of tabs makes sense. At this point, stop! Certainly, if the company thinks a design looks "dated", it could be updated at some other time, but ideally there would be zero change in information architecture to go along with it. Again, most people wouldn't notice the colors had changed subtly and information would be in exactly the same place it was, but ideally you'd be able to measure things like "number of users reporting that the site gives them eyestrain decreased by XX%". GitHub certainly isn't perfect, but their UX people do seem to be fairly good. I've been using the product since it looked as it did back in 2013, and without side by side images, I actually couldn't point to any one point in time and say "that's when they redesigned the product and everything changed!".