Sam's World Of No

What I like about Zeldman is his can-do attitude. Earlier this year, a set of rants and comments about the demographic of people engaged in web design, and particularly the male/female debate, was marked by its lack of informed data. So Zeldman and various other happy cog people, through their A List Apart/An Event Apart vehicles, commissioned a full survey to try and plug the gap. It was published on the 24th of April this year, and open to responses for almost a month. There were 32,831 respondents, and the full report is available online, along with the data breakdowns.

I took the survey and have had a good old read of the report. I am sure that many of us will have something to say about this in the days to come. Here are some opening points after my first glance at the report; these are the ones I feel most strongly about or are, in my view, the most important findings in terms of the project’s scope and the wider web.

1. Exactly what is “Web Design”? I am certain that a lot of thought was put into the name of this survey, but I am not sure that “Design” is the right angle. Happy Cog and Zeldman are, primarily, a front-end/look and feel shop, so I can see why they chose it. For people like myself, who work full time on the web, create interfaces, build systems and create architectures, but would never consider themselves to be a ‘designer’, it’s just an inappropriate title. But then again, all the other terms are loaded too. The only one that isn’t, “Web Worker”, doesn’t sound like anything you would be introducing yourself as any time soon.
2. There is blogging well and there is blogging badly. The survey finds that roughly three quarters of all web professionals keep a blog or personal site. This proportion stands, broadly speaking, for all salary groupings, job title groupings and age groupings. The title of this section of the report states that “Ownership of a personal website has little or no bearing on success”, which is true. Unfortunately, no account was taken of the amount of traffic/popularity/PR/”importance” or other value factors related to these sites. It would have been interesting to see what proportions of these sites are regularly updated, which are regularly read, and which are ranked as ‘important’ by search engines and social bookmarking systems. I think that it is fair to say that the people who earn more and are higher on the career ladder would also have more popular blogs; some data about this effect and its causality would have been good. As it is, it’s a little bit like saying everyone who works on the web has a website. It’s a bit like getting data that says that racing drivers have cars.
3. There is no widespread practical education for web development. We have this rant at least once a week at work, where we wish we could employ more people (we employ people as fast as they can apply), and more people who had been academically educated in the field. Computer Science is a great degree but courses rarely provide practical, real-world training on the web, and certainly doesn’t formally educate in the soft skills that web development shops need. With marketing, it’s even worse. We long for people who have been formally trained in product management for the web, and wouldn’t need teaching even the most basic information about syntax, how to write for the web and how to manage product and brand identity. I guess this skill is not admired by very small e-commerce ventures, is mostly covered by senior management or customer service in medium ventures, and is utilised by highly-corporate executives and leading marketing experts in larger ventures. So it is not surprising to find that most web professionals did not take a degree which they themselves do not consider to be relevant to their current work. Whether this takes into account soft skills (for me, problem-solving, communication and analytical skills were large and relevant parts of an education in history), cannot be determined. Interestingly, people like project managers, whom I would have thought would be those who are specifically trained in ‘management’ are amongst those who see their education as the least relevant. Perhaps abstract management training just doesn’t provide them with the technical skills they need. Or perhaps technical training didn’t provide them with the management skills they need.
4. “Increased educational attainment generally appears to correspond to increased earning in our sample”. Yes, and in every other survey ever completed. Across the board. But…
5. …“As income level increases, the percentages of respondents for whom their college studies were relevant decreases”. This one is interesting. As is pointed out, salary tends to increase with age, and the time since graduating tends to increase with age, and the relevancy of education decreases over time. Most web development professionals will move into a more managerial role as they progress through their career; this will necessarily involve more people skills and fewer technical skills. In addition, it seems to be that the industry is still, broadly speaking, biased against people with specialist technology degrees. I argue again that this is because these degrees do not have enough web focus to make their applicants suitable for this kind of work. Perhaps this because other types of programming jobs pay more, I don’t know.
6. The proportion of women is just low. Sometimes there really are statistical realities, and the women argument appears to be one. 1 in 10 workers in this profession are women. This is interesting because it addresses the debate that sparked the survey in the first place. They occupy the mid-salary ranges, not the high-salary ranges that high profile people would be expected to occupy, and they generally are happy with their salaries. I hate to say it, but it looks like there really aren’t that many women to do things like speak at conferences and write books. The problem that needs addressing is that there aren’t enough women, not that they don’t get invited to conferences because we are scared of them. I mean, we are scared of them, but we’d get over it if they were around.
7. Nobody wants to be a webmaster. It’s not a cool title, it’s not the sort of title that a dedicated and going-places web shop would use. Frankly, I think it’s pejorative. And in terms of job satisfaction, the people that hold this title are the least satisfied. Of course, the different between their satisfaction and that of the most satisfied category, “Project Manager” is only 10 and a bit percent, but still. Let’s get rid of this title once for all and give the sometimes extremely talented people that hold something decent to put on their business cards. While we’re at it, let’s get them some business cards. We’ve been promising them for ages. The design guys were supposed to be sorting it. I don’t know.
8. We need to learn to write. Possibly so that we can communicate better, possibly so we can improve the amount of success a blog gives you (see point 2), or possibly because of all the under-rated web skills, writing is still the largest. Almost 50% of respondents thought this was a major skill gap for them; I predict that this number will, slowly, change as the importance of the word on the web is finally drilled into skulls everywhere.
9. Let’s all go on holiday. Or a vacation. Just exactly where are we going? It isn’t mentioned in the report (that I could see), but the questions about ‘holiday’ vs. ‘vacation’ were nonsensical to non-US English speakers. I’m a British English speaker, and I barely understood the distinction. Europe has ‘public holidays’ and ‘bank holidays’, guys. Make this distinction clearer next time and you’ll get some meaningful data.
10. Where is the section that tells us who earns more? Finding out your friends’ or co-workers’ salaries is not always a fun game - kind of like when an inappropriate animal documentary comes on when you’re visiting your grandparents - but it would be nice to know which professions are making the money. This is such a glaring omission that I’m sure I must have missed it. Granted, I could correlate the data myself as it has been provided, but why would a couple of stats experts miss this obvious point?

Of course, what will be most interesting about this will be the charting of data over time. Without patterns, controls and averaging, we can’t see what’s actually going on and we can’t spot blips. I would also like to know the average time of year for pay rises and job changes - does the timing of the survey make a big difference?

That said, it’s a terrific start and good on people for getting it done and laying important foundations. Now lets build on them, and get the diversity of our industry up to a respectable level. Because it will help us all in the long run. Seriously.

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