They say a jack of all trades is a master of none. I recently was given cause to reflect on the meandering journey my career has taken, how I came to be a web hack, and just how I classify my skills.
It all started with a phone call from an old friend. I won’t bore you with the details, but basically he needed some help setting up a website. Toward the end of the call he commented on the irony of him calling me for help. You see, 10-15 years ago I was the second-least computer savvy person among my friends. I was definitely a dreaded end user, whereas most of my other friends were programmer “computer geeks”. While I could run and install software, they were bending the command line (yes, back in the DOS and Windows 3.11 days) to their wills.
Yet time marched on, as it usually does, and technology kept evolving. Back then, one could be a “computer geek”, but today I think that term is near meaningless. Today we have software engineers, web developers, interface developers, game designers, and so on. Now, over the last 15 years I’ve learned a thing or two about HTML, CSS, domains, managing forums, WordPress, and e-commerce. Meanwhile my friend learned programming and database management. We’re still both “computer geeks”, but with vastly different skill sets.
Traditionally blue collar and white collar have distinguished more industrial/vocational jobs from the desk variety. However I think it’s time to turn those distinctions around. As we enter an information economy, maybe it’s time to distinguish the generalists from the specialists. I definitely fall into the “jack of all trades” category. I regularly write, modify photos in Photoshop, lay out ads in InDesign or Illustrator, and of course manage websites. For the latter, I use the applications given to me–phpmyadmin, WordPress, Dreamweaver, and so on. Yet I tremble with fear when forced to make manual table changes to mysql, and I never have learned PHP. In my mind, that makes me a white collar webmaster–I get the high level stuff, but the nuts and bolts are beyond me.* Compare that to a dedicated webmaster, one who knows little or nothing about marketing but who can hack away at code and bend browsers to their wills. I’d categorize them as blue collar webmasters. In short, white collar webmasters like myself only have the skills to use the tools that are put in front of them, while blue collar webmasters can make their own tools.
So what are you? Be it in web design or any other profession. Are you a generalist like me, or do you actually work the nuts and bolts of your profession (heck, do you only have a single profession?) at a fundamental level?
* You have to cut me a certain amount of slack. My background is in marketing and my education is in journalism, so it shouldn’t be terribly unexpected that my web skills are pedestrian.
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