The web industry/community/sector/business is a pretty unique place. Some good reasons and some bad. I don’t know many that cause so much discussion and generate so many side products.
Side what?
By side products, I’m talking books, conferences, blogs, magazines, podcasts, side projects, frameworks and even rapping. It seems there is always something new conjured up by the great minds of the web. It’s actually hard to keep up.
Now of course, this is all amazing. It’s a massive plus point of the web. It generates so much stuff. Ok, so some of it is shite and some of it is made to keep the “author” at the top of the fame tree but all in all, we work in a pretty cool business.
Not everyone has the time of course to spend hours on their own thing, or travel 100’s of miles to talk about a topic. Some don’t have the skills to make certain things and some just plain don’t want to.
Some simply won’t care, they will do what they need to do to survive but for some and it can range from already talented and established people or someone just starting out, they can start to feel a bit, well behind the times and not as clever as the others.
Which is a bit shit really.
It’s not intentional of course. I don’t think as a collective, the web decided to make people feel bad. It’s just happened.
The web industry by nature is he/she who shouts loudest. There are thousands of voices trying to get noticed so being heard amongst it is pretty hard. For some, me included, they don’t like to shout from the rooftops. Self promotion is not a natural process and they kind of just let things take their own course.
I often wonder if I was more aggressive with my pushing, I might have written an article for Netmag or maybe spoken at that conference about “Designers and how shit at web they are” ;). It goes for so many. It’s hard to be noticed.
Do you want to be noticed?
We all do. Don’t lie. We all want some recognition. It’s natural. Social media has helped it of course now so we all broadcast 24 hours a day and it won’t be going away any time soon.
I didn’t want to talk about all that though
Like I was saying ages ago before a deviation, many feel inadequate or left behind when really. There will always be clever people. There will always be people who are better at talking about it and pushing their stuff. There will always be people who push the better talkers to the front.
Someone asked me recently, what my biggest achievement was whilst working in the web. I told them I’d not missed a bill payment, had food in the cupboards and was able to provide my kids with everything they have wanted thus far.
And that goes for anyone out there who wonder what they have to show for year(s) working in the web. If you are paying bills, you are doing something good and no amount of shouting about it on Twitter will replace that. Knowing my kids won’t be hungry and cold is reward enough for the hours spent wrangling with CSS and making logos bigger.
Now I’m not saying don’t make cool stuff. I implore you to do so. But don’t get down if nobody talks about it much.
That’s just life.