William Yarbrough

A conversation transpired the other day in which a colleague of mine remarked that he’d had it with “hacks” in our industry – that is, those who call themselves developers and designers but still use recycled code, un-secure scripts, and kludged together markup. He complained that there should be an education requirement (like that of doctors, lawyers and engineers) and that the lack of professional underpinnings was killing our industry. He argues:

“There’s such a low entry level to our industry, all you need is photoshop & wordpress to build a site”

“… [T]here are hacks in the webdesign/deve industry (like other industries) and education would help weed them out.”

“Anyone can participate even if they’ve never built a site before or their a seasoned vet.”

These arguments (and I hear them frequently amongst professionals in my field, especially after a few years of making a good, honest living doing this) are worrisome to me. I myself did not earn any degree in my industry (for those that don’t know: I have a B.S. in Microbiology and Immunology. NOT Web development. NOT Advertising. NOT Computer science.) and in fact, most of my most trusted colleagues didn’t either. Ours is a very, very young industry and we should do well to remember that our pioneers are not so old yet. Even surgery was once the domain of the barber. I think the low level of entry is amazingly effective in bringing in new talent who really want to understand and change the industry in new and powerful ways. What first got you into the Web field?

Education, to me, seems a horrifyingly poor way to “weed out” those hacks in the industry. High-powered ADAs who help put away mass murders, rapists, and pedophiles went to law school. The ambulance chasers and DWI-Dudes also went to law school. Education seems to be a rather poor way to separate the hacks from the pros – there are plenty of diploma-factories out there who are all to happy to give you a slip of paper giving you a degree in “Web Paging” in exchange for cold cash. The education is nice, but it’s my belief that Mark Twain was right: “I have never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” I myself teach classes on development and accessibility, I give back by posting on forums and message boards, I try to attend meetups and conferences to learn and share my knowledge with others because it keeps my skills sharp as well as opening me up to learn something from those with different life experiences.

The last point really gets under my skin. I feel that an argument like this is birthed from time removed from a time when the professional was starting out. I will be the first to admit I came in through the hobby and hacker route – I was a little script kiddy doing my best. I learned from stealing source code, playing with scripts from other sites and honestly hacking crap together until I understood how it worked. Tim Berners Lee started this little experiment to help researchers publish content to a hub. This isn’t the Sorbonne, it’s the Wild West – it’s open and free and it’s what we all love deep down in our hearts. I feel the day that we treat this as an elites-only walled garden, is the day our profession will have fallen to so much accounting and pixel pushing. I know the concern is that it lowers professionalism for those of us who make money doing this professionally, but it’s true for any industry. There are those who will prefer the cheap suits at Sears, but there are plenty who respect and want a bespoke piece from Savile Row. The cream always rises to the top, so they say.

So I welcome all the hackers, hacks, script kiddies, punks, and noobs. There’s always more to learn, more that noobs can teach us about ourselves and our established modes of thinking and that’s frankly better for all of us.