Yippy skippy hoorah!
For whatever reason (I blame the relative youth of the tubes) there is little data out there on the people who are actually designing, coding, implementing, consulting, and basically sacrificing to make the Web a nice place. Thank goodness A List Apart, one of the finest online resources for people like me, decided back in 2007 to start a survey (the results of which can be seen here – 2007 survey results from a list apart) to document all this undocumented stuff.
I participated back in 2007 and I’m really glad I did. It really showed me how in and out of tune I was with the rest of my peers. I know I’m certainly WAY under-paid, I’m doing the job of roughly three people (thank the Web gods it’s not a design position on top of that), and it’s perfectly fine that I don’t have a degree in what I do because neither do about 46% of the industry!
I encourage all my peers out there to participate and help us figure out how to make this brilliant career work for all of us! If you’re a designer, a code monkey, a back-end sysadmin, or just a student making sites in your spare time, fill out the 45 question form (took me about 5 minutes) and we can see some cool results in the coming months! I love the fact that there are so many job titles from goofy pc-correct/ new-agey/ Web 2.0 “Information Implementation Engineers” to old school “Web-masters” to the bizarre “Lead Programmer” (that’s my title and it really makes no sense and insults those who actually do the hardcore coding tasks), there’s little standardization in the industry. I prefer “Web Developer” because I think it’s short and to the point.
