Where do Web developers fall in the programming salary hierarchy? How much does experience matter? Find out if your compensation package as a Web developer is above or below the industry mean in our exclusive DevX.com special report.
by Lori Piquet, Editor-in-Chief
Web development can be a thankless job. Programmers and application designers of the pre-Web age were usually insulated from the opinions and criticisms of the company at large, primarily because so few people were interested in or familiar with the possibilities of a program's design.
For example, if you had built a terminal emulation application for the accounting department to grab legacy data off a mainframe, it would have been—and still might often be—very unusual for one of the end users to make design suggestions. They didn't understand the architecture of the back end data repository and, in many cases, it would be their first experience with an application of that type and therefore they would have no reference point for comparison.
This is a far cry from the Web developer's world: With the Web, everybody fancies themselves an expert. Comparisons to functionality, navigation, and design of other public Web sites are inevitable. To add to the pressure, the Web is the single most important customer service tool for the vast majority of companies. Which means executive management is going to be keenly interested in what you do, how quickly, and how well.
And let's not forget to mention the rate of innovation in Web-related technologies. The need to constantly reinvent one's knowledge and balance education with production deadlines is another unique pressure of the job.
Which is to say that whatever your compensation level is, chances are you earn it and then some.
DevX.com wanted to find out what Web developers earn—particularly in the U.S.—how it compares to the salaries of other types of specialized programmers, and just how happy Web developers are at being Web developers. Our exclusive research study, conducted in the latter half of October 2000, revealed the answers to these questions and many others. In many cases, the actual numbers have been rounded to the nearest thousand or whole percentage for display purposes.
| Mean Base Salaries by Region |
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Our research found that though Web developers in California earn the most, many other regions are quickly catching up. Web developers in the South came averaged second highest in salary by region, earning just under $70,000. At the low end, the mid-Atlantic, Mountain, and Pacific Northwest regions were roughly tied as the lowest earning regions in the U.S.
