[thelist] Career Q's

1) Does it count against you if you have no formal quailifications?
obviously it would depend on the qual'.

I never even graduated from High School, and now I am the Webmaster at the
second largest operating foundation in the United States!  Its all about
what you take away from an experience.  School, classes, books are all good
things, as is knowledge transfer from peers, but you have to want to learn
something from it all.


2) For getting experience, are you better to try and develop for clients
directly, or work for another company?

This gets personal.  And really you kind of need both.  There are
fundamental principles of information architecture that you can only fully
explore while working freelance for smaller clients.  But then to learn how
to truly put it all together and make it stick, there is no better training
ground than a large corporate intranet. I would put forth this sweeping
generalism (take it for what it is worth)..... you will probably only get
the smaller independent clients at the beginning of your career, so take
advantage of those learning opportunities for what they are when you can.
Then you will inevitably be involved in a much larger team oriented web
strategy when you get good enough to start earning some real money, and you
may not have much time to go back and get the 'small stuff'.  Evolution has
a way of kicking you in the butt like that.


3) how seriously do poeple take hand-coders?
If your a WD company, do you perfer hand-coders or not, or do you 
avoid them?

I only hire people who could code by hand alone, and from my experience most
shops feel the same.  My employees use Homesite, BBEdit and Dreamweaver as
tools, and the WYSIWYG of Dreamweaver is really only used after some hand
code to modify the program to write and implement html in a manner more to
our liking.


4) How essentail is Database experience?
Are other skills have a higher priority?
IE - Javascript?

I think you really need to be a database person, or not.  A little crossover
is good, but when you really get down to doing the heavy stuff, the work
gets divided up pretty severely in most shops.  You should have a "working
knowledge" of everything you can, but the skills that will server you best
are the ones that revolve around information architecture, structure and
presentation.

JavaScript and ASP skills will serve you extremely well, and are pretty easy
to pick up.  Being a capable problem solver is really the key... a typical
Webmonkey is not necessarily expected to know how to complete all tasks off
the top of their head, but to be able to weigh several options and create
the best solution possible for the situation.

Good luck!


> --
> 
> Christopher Orth - Webmaster
> The Casey Family Program
> -
> corth@casey.org
> Desk: 206-282-7300 X 8556
> Mobile: 206-510-4465
> Text messages to: 2065104465@page.nextel.com