This is interesting. A Sitepoint survey reveals four web developer “types”:
- The “Guru” is strongly motivated toward technical excellence, actively tracks new technological trends, and is interested in learning how to use them to improve the quality and functionality of web sites.
- The “Entrepreneur” is strongly motivated toward building and retaining an audience, and is less interested in using technologies just because they’re new.
- The “Designer” is strongly motivated toward the timely delivery of visually appealing web sites that meet the business requirements of clients.
- The “Corporate” is strongly motivated toward reliable, stable performance; the “Corporate works in a larger organization, and faces the unique mixture of constraints and opportunities that the corporate environment offers.
This sounds about right to me. I’m definitely more of the Entrepreneur type by nature, but also because I currently work for a small company that is focused on marketing to its prospective customers. You just can’t specialize and expect to be as effective when you have a team of one to two people tasked with achieving all projects that need to be online. However, it helps to be able to slip into the other modes when necessary. It’s all about maintaining the flexibility needed to meet the overall strategic goals. In other words, creating a visually stunning design or implementing an amazing CMS should not supercede the need to make the phone ring and get the information out to your customers if that’s what needs to happen. In larger corporate settings where you’re one of many in amongst an array of departments, you can worry about version control, documentation, or overall content management. Likewise, if you’re running a design house, you can spend time obsessing over every visual detail to support one of your client’s online ad campaigns. But, if you design / build in-house for a small company, you just have to get stuff done.