[IxDA Discuss] A List Apart web design survey results

[Katie Albers]

Since I get a few hundred email every day which require actual 
responses, and there are also people who expect to do -- you know -- 
work, the time I have to spend on resources like ALA is tightly 
limited. It's one of a few places where I check in periodically so 
things don't get away from me and I use it and other sites as 
resources if I run into problems or terms I don't understand... but 
this is starting to sound like some of you expect the people you work 
with to stay 100% current with whatever it says, all the time and to 
me that brings up the problem of making assessments of how to spend 
one's time most usefully.

I'm not clear when staying up-to-date on A List Apart became a proxy 
for staying up-to-date with our field, but it sounds like a false 
comparison to me. Of course the last list I read in its entirety 
every day was the NCSA's list of "today's new web sites" and that's 
loooooong gone.

In any case, frankly the entire thread is taking on a thoroughly 
unpleasant note of superiority and absolutism. Can we experiment with 
the idea that serious, professional people prefer different resources 
for almost every purpose.

Furthermore, if there are a "disturbingly high number of web 
professionals" who don't follow ALA, I'd say that's a pretty good 
argument for the data being skewed by the venue.

Katie

At 6:13 PM -0400 10/21/07, Matthew Nish-Lapidus wrote:
>I've encountered a disturbingly high number of web professionals, be
>they designers or developers, in the agency world who don't know
>anything about the industry at large.
>
>A lot of people see this as a job, like all other jobs. .. however, if
>they're any good at all, or have any passion for their work, they
>quickly learn about resources like ALA.  The ones that don't have a
>hard time keeping up and in the end work on low end projects, or have
>a hard time finding work at all.
>
>Like a few people have mentioned, I always ask interviewees what
>websites they read, and a good answer goes a long way to getting the
>job.  Conversely, a bad answer really makes me wonder why this person
>wants the job in the first place.
>
>Passionate workers == good work.  And passionate web workers read
>websites/blogs about our profession.
>
>
>On 10/21/07, Todd Zaki Warfel <lists at toddwarfel.com> wrote:
>>
>>  On Oct 20, 2007, at 7:28 PM, Joseph Selbie wrote:
>>
>>  > I'd guess that in every profession most of the professionals are in
>>  > fact very insulated by the companies they work for and don't
>>  > actively follow trends in their profession online or off.
>>
>>  Perhaps this is a difference between innies and outies? Or do those
>>  of you who work for consulting firms also find the same thing in your
>>  colleagues?
>
>--
>Matt Nish-Lapidus
>email/gtalk: mattnl at gmail.com
>++
>LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mattnl
>Home: http://www.nishlapidus.com


-- 

----------------
Katie Albers
katie at firstthought.com