Things Done Changed…

2007 marks 10 years since I first got online, and I’ve been doing webby work for the last 8, of course back in 1999/2000 I never thought I’d actually be earning a living doing that kind of work.

Which recently got me thinking about how much the web landscape has changed over the years, back in 1999/2000 all you really needed was a knowledge of HTML and CSS and you were good to go. Even a few years ago all you needed was the same plus either ASP, PHP, .NET, Perl or ColdFusion combined with SQL but now I’m going to job interviews and people are expecting candidates to have so many hats on, it’s almost ridiculous.

Here’s a recent example:

Minimum Job Qualifications
– Perl, XML/XSLT, JSON, REST, SOAP, AJAX, SQL, MySQL
– Unix Shell programming experience including bash, regex, sed, awk, grep, cron, etc.
– Experince writing C++ PHP Extensions and utilizing GNU tools
– Major Browser, ActiveX, Mozilla Plugin, Windows registry and software installation
related experience
– Knowledge of object-oriented design patterns and data management systems,
relational and object-oriented
– Graphics and UI design skills

And that’s just for a “web designer” position, I’ll honestly say I don’t know what half that stuff even means, but at what point did the lines between web designer and web developer blur? My major downfall is I know little bits of this and that, I know enough PHP to get by, same with ASP, ColdFusion, so of course I put that in my resume. This inevitably leads to call from staffing agencies asking if I think I’d be suitable for a ColdFusion (or anything else for that matter) developer position.

Maybe no one wants designers anymore, we’re a dime a dozen really, why pay some guy $55k a year when you can get a kid with FrontPage Express to do “as good a job” for much less? It’s all about developers now (insert your own “developers! developers! developers!” joke here), maybe Biggie Smalls was right all along, things done changed, either you’re slingin’ crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot.