A List Apart Web Design Survey
Note: This article was published while I was in my early 20s. I was much younger and dumber. Please don't hold it against me. One of the perils of having a 20+ year old website!
Last week, popular web development website A List Apart (ALA) released the results of it’s 2007 Web Design Survey. I’ve spent the last few days reading over the 82 page document and found a good amount of the results interesting.
- Over 80% of the respondents were White Males
- 48% came from the USA
- When asked if they were excited by their field, 43.6% said Fequently, 35% said Very Frequently, meaning 78.6% like what they do most of the time.
- About 20% want to start their own business as their next move.
- Of that 20%, 89.9% were men.
- 47.9% are in the salary range of $20,000 – $80,000, where 52.3% have been in the industry 5 years or less.
- 1/2 of the people in my age group (21-24) make less than $20,000. Something to consider is most people who graduate college are 21 or 22.
- ALA found that Job Satisfaction increases with age. I think this is because when starting out, (for me anyway), you’re not doing the cool and exciting stuff you’d like to. My internships consisted mostly of fixing HTML, and not any real development.
- Of those who saw an age bias, Under 21 and 21-24 combined made up for 70.2% of the respondents.
- 22% of female respondents saw gender bias, where only 1.5% of male respondents did. (NOTE- that is 22% of the females, which made up ~16% and 1.5% of the males, which made up ~84%).
What was most surprising to me was how big the gap between male and female respondents is. I knew the computing field is male dominated, but I didn’t think it was that one sided. This survey also gave me a pretty good idea of what I can expect as a salary once I get out of Grad School. You can download and review the results here, and if you are a web professional, I strongly recommend it. It’s extremely informative.
