The Webmaster Place

Ok, I have a confession to make.

Once upon a time I would have been considered a real geek. I had a degree in Computer Engineering from a prestigious university and a great resume as a programmer and network administrator. That was when the Web was just getting started.

But — I also had an interest in people, and I saw the potential of using the power of the Internet to reach many more people with much less effort. So when the Internet first started gathering steam I jumped in, even before there was a World Wide Web.

There was also a second “but” — I got tired of always racing after the latest programming languages and tools. Sure I had worked with about 15 different languages and had a background in hardware, networking and system administration as well. But there was always new stuff coming along and if one didn’t know it, well, one was behind and one’s skills were less in demand.

There was a third “but” as well — I have a bit of graphical talent and enjoy drawing, layout and other graphical fields even though I am far from being a graphic artist.

Becoming a webmaster was the perfect way to put all the above together. I could use my technical skills to reach lots of people, playing around with graphics stuff along the way. And I had most of the skills needed for creating web sites already. Not only did I not have to chase after old technology to be able to create sites, the skills needed online changed more slowly than the programming field as a whole. Maybe that was because it was only one small subsection of programming so I didn’t have to worry about EVERYTHING going on in the field. Regardless, I no longer felt that I was always behind the game.

As my company slowly grew my technical skills grew slowly but my business skills grew much more quickly. Having a technical foundation is awesome, but if you want to make real money you need to know business, marketing, sales, and/or management. That is where my focus of learning is now.

It is very sad but I am having second thoughts on the hi-tech field in general. I see people that are older than myself who have been programming for decades and now no one wants to hire them. What is scary is that it is happening to me too. As I approach 40 my skills are the “old” ones. I program the “old” way. If I were to get a job as a programmer I wouldn’t deserve nearly as much money as I can get running my own company.

What kind of profession is it that the more experience you have the less valuable you are? It is like being a sports star — you have retire by the time you are 40. Except that if you are geek you normally don’t get huge bucks along the way so you can’t retire at 40 even if you want to.

So this blog is not going to teach you much along the way of new technical skills. I don’t have them to teach you. Well, maybe I could help you debug a messed up table or script that is driving you crazy. For some things experience still matters. But otherwise I am going to be focussing on ways to make money. I know a bit about that by now and you need to know it too.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, February 11th, 2006 at 7:28 pm and is filed under The business of webmastering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.