How much can a web developer expect to earn?
An article over at ItManagement compares developer the rise and fall of developer salaries between 2004-2009 and the results just confirm the obvious.
Nobody knows a programmers value.
On one hand you have the increasing utility and ubiquitusness of software in the world always keeping demand steady for IT workers worldwide. On the other you have the utility and ubiquitusness of developer knowledge making it really easy to get into the software game and start getting paid for it.
You don’t need a college education anymore, you don’t need to live near your clients or customers, and you can find everything you need to know to get started with any language and technology without leaving your computer screen.
7-9 years ago I was considered a savant because I could throw together some HTML pages. These days I’m competing with kids and developers from countries with lower costs of living on craigslist.org and elance.com willing to make $5 an hour.
When you consider stories like low cost internet starups like Motormouth.com ( built for $9,800 ) and Truemors.com ( built for $12,000 ) I always worry about the future of web development and the salaries it will provide.
Maybe the embedded device / enterprise desktop app markets are different. However how much harder is a Winforms or WPF app to make than a website or alternatively what kind of app needs a fancy OS gui when a website will do? Maybe the cobol and assembly programmers deserve such high salaries but it just doesn’t make sense for web developers to get paid in the $70k range anymore.
The web industry is being overtaken by the cheap amateur. Nothing new to this statement really as web developers have been bitching about the freelance cheapies for ages now. The difference at this point is now we’ve been watching this happen for 6 years and there is no indication its going to change anytime soon.
What I wonder about is if web developers understand this is happening and trying to improve their skills to adjust or are we resisting change by being oblivious to it like the newspaper industry did? A post over at reddit.com was about how much Php freelancer should charge for his work. A lot of people said $40-$100 an hour and I don’t think that makes much sense anymore.
In my opinion over the next 5-6 years its going to be the web developers that bring something special to the table that are successful. You can’t just be a plain jane web developer and you’ll have to specialize in something like SEO, social media, or high traffic OLTP applications. Being able to design and slice up a PSD, connect to a database to spit out some rows isn’t going to be enough.
26. May 2009 um 09:41
“The web industry is being overtaken by the cheap amateur. ”
I totally disagree with that statement. Why? You’ve said so yourself – “These days I’m competing with kids and developers from countries with lower costs of living”
Because of the cost of living, average pay in your country etc. While you’re asking 150$ for a hour of your work, I’m getting 150PLN (150 Polish zloty = 47.5134 US$, via Google) witch is damn good here in Poland. Don’t expect others to rise their prices just because your living costs are 3 or more times higher than yours.
Now sure – I’m not doing much work for foreign clients. But I bet lots of us are.
26. May 2009 um 09:43
Whoops.
“more times higher than OURS.”
26. May 2009 um 14:03
Just for the record, it’s ubiquity, not “ubiquitusness”.
28. May 2009 um 23:33
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