@iamlost, nice sharing. Yet... I'm confused.
@to everyone...
In my region you can find lots of people saying the same (I'm talking, again: about my region). Lots of people with whatever experience on Ruby, PHP, MYSQL, etc. Whatever, you can find lots of people with lots of abilities, many of them didn't study at the university and didn't get an specialization, this also includes gurus on mobile apps development.
My experience, however... reveals many of them won't stay at any company for more than 1 year. Many of them in fact claim that experience, yes, but their work is terrible. Now I have to change the "many" and use a better term: MOST of them produced websites that nobody visits, those sites are SLOW, with errors and often hacked, not to mention clients who don't want to hear about them anymore.
My school was the web, reading, experimenting, and to be fair and honest: this forum, oh yes, Brett, Tangor, Incredibill and I could mention at least 20 people that shared lots of valuable information on how to do things (sorry for not mentioning them all). Many things are already on the web, like javascript, but there is more to learn to be able of making things work, all of that I learned it here. The webmaster industry is suffering a lot in my area, prices went down terribly and mostly: clients had bad experiences, this is so terrible here that most people go for fanpages on facebook. You see lots of project being born and die right away, and most of all: zero to terrible content. Sounds like a business opportunity we might say... well for what they are willing to pay I don't think so.
I made a test on a regional forum having lots of soft developers including mobile developers, I asked who actually FINISHED a mobile app. Well all of them were trowing comments on how easy it was to do this and that on Android Studio, Swift, Xcode, etc whatever, but nobody actually said "me, at least one app", nobody. Also worked on a company where we needed a mobile app, the project died, the client went away and tried to hire other people only to fail because it's all false claims and unfinished work. (I didn't have enough dev experience on mobile at that point).
Applied for a job a at X company selling software, they sell mobile apps and managed to get two big clients, you can find the reviews on the market being negative, terrible and you might as well delete the app because there is no user base, people don't use it.
My favorite story. Yes I worked on a big media company over 13 years managing a chain of websites, each website had from 3.5K daily to 7.5K daily, pure unique visits, it was fast, all on my own CMS of my design based on Perl. When I was about to leave the company asked approval to migrate everything to Drupal, why? nobody would be trained to continue with my CMS, I would not be paid to instruct nobody, etc, so a mid tech solution was needed. Why Drupal? it speaks for itself.
Result? after struggling and wanting a new design, they went to a big Advertising Agency (BBDO), they have their own IT and DEV dept. Funny enough I applied for a job there later, we didn't agree on many things, ok. Long story short they turned the largest site into Wordpress. What happened to the 30K of original articles published over the years? DELETED, they couldn't migrate the info, that was soooo easy! The site now takes 4 to 5 times to load, besides being slow is terrible, unfriendly, terrible UX (yes based on a template) and it was expensive, I could live with that amount of money for long. It was a mess, still is. And yes I got to know the people at that department, all sound like that.
I learned, it doesn't matter what people say, most don't own a single website with decent traffic, most are unable to build it, and yet they claim to have so much experience but won't last at any job (millenials?) it sucks. So, it takes experience, doing, and also being able to build something that lasts. That's just my opinion, sorry for the long post, I just felt like sharing.
Being a Webmaster
