Comments on: Designers versus Developers?

By: Brad Pollard

Brad Pollard — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 07:44:25 +0000

I particularly enjoyed the talk that Shane Morris gave us at the Sydney WSG meeting in May. The topic is always a very interesting one. I don’t believe that the size of a company determines whether ‘devigners’ exist there or not – some folks are just naturally gifted. Oops, did I say devigners? Shane used this term to describe a web professional capable of both design and development.

By: Ben Buchanan

Ben Buchanan — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 01:51:07 +0000

Web developers are still requried to have a broad skills base, I think. There are definitely more opportunities to specialise, although my situation still seems rare – we have specialist experience architects, designers, frontend developers and backend developers. From that alone you could probably guess I work for a very large company.

Thankfully there is one trend that seems to have been reduced: the Unrealistic Underpaid Swiss Army Knife Job Ad. You know the one, “required skills – must have five year’s experience in all of the following: design, technical writing, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Java, ASP, Perl, Python, COBOL, ancient hebrew, database administration, business analysis and project management. $50k p/a.”

Hybrid positions will always remain though, especially in smaller shops. Just a fact of life, and it’s not like they’re a bad thing so long as the person in them *wants* to be more of a generalist than a narrow-focussed specialist

By: Wayne Smallman

Wayne Smallman — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 18:03:42 +0000

It is fortuitous that this ‘blog post should show up in my Google Alerts, because only this morning, someone came to my ‘blog from a query very similar to the theme of this post.

It’s also a topic I’ve ruminated on in the past.

I am that man in the middle; a designer and a developer.

As a generalist, I am able to see most if not all of the issues.

Additionally, I’m able to see what qualities I need in 3rd parties I might engage with to get certain aspects of my projects complete.

Most of the time, I work alone and need little or no outside help.

Personally, I don’t think you’re ever going to see any imbalance in favour of either specialists or generalists…

By: pureCaffeine

pureCaffeine — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 23:46:54 +0000

WSG Canberra, 28 March 2007…

Just some notes on the Web Standards Group (WSG) meeting in Canberra this afternoon.

……

By: Gary Barber

Gary Barber — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 12:31:22 +0000

Yeap the statistics are as follows the percentage of small business is 97% (reference - Small Business in Australia, 2001). The percentage of this as of 2004 that are home based is 67.5% (reference - Characteristics of Small Business, Australia (Reissue), 2004 ). Which if you think about it is huge. Of this 68.8% are Sole Operators. So it figures that 45% overall are Home based Sole Operators in industry. Translate that to the web industry. Nearly half are hybrids.

By: Nathanael

Nathanael — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 11:33:56 +0000

Perhaps the hybrid role IS a specialist role?

Also on the point of the prevalence of small web teams – I think based on the stats that (from memory) 90% of Australian businesses are small or home based, possibly the cut-off was 5 or less staff? I’d have to check those – but that would seem to indicate that if we went with those stats and applied to just the web and design industry that yes indeed most web teams are going to be small units where the business can’t afford to have specialists in each separate role.

And thanks for the referral!