Back in May, I encouraged those in the web community to complete A List Apart’s First Annual Web Design Survey. Well, almost 33,000 web geeks did answer the questions, and, after five months of analysis, ALA has released the results.

And, although ALA itself admits that there were some problems with the survey…

We did not learn everything we hoped to. Ambiguities in some parts of the survey yielded ambiguities in some data. After an analysis of the survey itself, we now possess detailed recommendations for improving future surveys (citation).

.. the results are pretty interesting.

Findings

Here are a few points that I found most interesting in my project management role. The actual report is 82 pages long, so this is just a sampling:

Project Managers Have the Highest Level of Job Satisfaction
Interesting to me in the “Job satisfaction by job title” section was that the creative folks - creative directors, web designers, designers - all reported job satisfaction levels below the survey average (page 47). The least satisfied job title is webmaster, so remember to give some props to whoever is updating your website today. And, while we’re talking about satisfaction, those working in a design, web, or IA agency were most satisfied, while the self-employed or freelance set were least satisfied in general (page 48).

Project Managers Don’t Blog (as much)
This, I can understand. When most of what you do is relationship building or dealing with proprietary information, it’s difficult to blog about your job. Still, 66.8% of project managers say that they have a blog… what we all write about, is still unknown (page 56). And, while the creative folks are least satisfied with their jobs, they must tell lots of people about it, as the ALA survey found that these people are most likely to have a blog.

Women Don’t Code
While most of the respondents to the survey were developers, only 7.2% of developers are women (pages 26 and 30). Yikes… makes me feel bad for defecting. Women are disproportionately represented in roles that require user empathy such as being a writer, user interface expert, information architect, accessibility expert, designer, or project manager (page 30).

It is startling to see the difference in perceived gender discrimination: while 4.9% of total respondents perceived a gender bias, 22.3% of women felt this way (page 60). Discouraging is the fact that as men earn more money, they are generally less likely to perceive gender inequality (page 66). And, there seems to be some salary inequality with more men than women with pay grades in the top levels (page 41).