My partner sent me a Link to A List Apart: Articles: Findings From the Web Design Survey the other day and I just took a few minutes to look over the 82 page document. I thought that the survey was full of interesting data, I personally took the survey a while back and can remember being anxious to see how it finally turned out. The survey was posted online at www.alistapart.com and was completed by professionals in the web design and development community. Here are some highlights I thought were kind of interesting.
43.6% of the respondents were between the ages of 25 and 32. My age bracket, 33-38, made up only 17.8% of those surveyed and 82.8% were males, go figure. When asked about Ethnicity 84.6% responded white while the next nationality in line was Asian, and they made up 6.6%.
When asked what their job titles were, 25.3% answered Developer and 19.9% answered Web Designer. Only 6.3% of those asked responded with Webmaster as their job title. I guess that term has fallen by the wayside over the years, it used to be popular back in the day.
On the topic of Education, over 50% of those surveyed had a Bachelors Degree, and 15% had a Masters. When asked if they were excited about their career path almost 80% answered that they were either excited or very excited about their career.
I thought that this next question was a pretty interesting onee, and would be interested to see results from next years survey on the same question. When asked if they had their own personal website or blog, over 70% answered yes. I knew that social networking had taken off and blog sites were all the rage these days, especially in the development community but I had no idea this figure would be this high, in fact, I got to looking at my contacts database of developers i have worked with through the years and only one or two out of about 300 or so developers had their own blog sites. However, most of the developers I know are very active on message boards and forums, in fact that’s how I have usually met most of them.
Out of the participants in the survey 28.4% worked for Enterprise / Corporations and 22.3% worked for Agencies or Design Firms. Only 23.4% of those surveyed work in a self-employed / freelance type situation. I am guessing that this number is likely in decline as most of the freelance developers I know are usually either doing other things or going to work for larger firms.
When asked about their schedules, 42.1% responded that they work a 40-50 hour week. I guess it goes to show that developers are probably the busiest people on the planet. I have said for a long time that if a commercial developer had to build as many storefronts that web developers had to build they wouldn’t be able to access enough labor or raw materials fast enough. The web is definitely where it’s at in terms of business growth, that’s my opinion, and some may disagree, but i see it everyday.
In this report I was shocked to see that old timers like myself with over 10 years of experience or so are still hanging in there with the newbies, 9% of those surveyed had 10 years of experience and 8% said that they had 1 year or less of experience. Most of those surveyed had in between 1 and 3 years of experience.
When it comes to actual skills, 81.3% of those surveyed knew HTML, XHTML. A surprising 78.2% said that they knew either PHP or ASP language for backend development. 77.5% of those surveyed were fluent in CSS and Javascripting.
In closing, I really enjoyed this report. The folks at ALA always put together some awesome content, very well produced, carefully thought out data. If you are in the web development industry, or considering it as your career path I think that this survey would be a good read to check out. Here is the link again: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/2007surveyresults. The report is available in PDF format.
[…] read more here […]