Tag: WordPress (Page 158 of 220)

In the previous post, I shared a few thoughts on the challenges of setting a WordPress developer salary. When I began writing out my opinion, I ended up writing a lot more than I had intended, so in order to keep posts at a shorter length (thus saving all of us time :) and sounding less monotonous, I’ve broken everything up into a handful of posts that I’m basically running as a series.

Yesterday, I laid it all out in that I shared three reasons as to why I think WordPress developer salaries are lower than that of the average software developer. There were some really good, thoughtful comments on the post, too.

And the whole point of doing that was to lay out a high-level view of my opinions before looking at the topic in more detail.

As much as I want to talk about more technical matters of WordPress, I think it’s worth noting that one reason that a WordPress developer salary is hard to set is that many still see WordPress as a content management system, if not just another blogging platform.

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Earlier this week, Ryan Sullivan – a twitter-friend of mine – sent out the following note:

Interesting. Add “WordPress” to almost any development job search and watch the salary magically drop 30%. Any thoughts why?

— Ryan Sullivan (@ryandonsullivan) July 14, 2014

An interesting observation, isn’t it? Especially for those who work on WordPress full time, work with WordPress full time, and/or those who have come to WordPress from other backgrounds. Specifically those in software development backgrounds.

Straight up, I’ll say that I don’t know why a WordPress developer salary is less than any other [insert whatever type of] developer salary is here, but I have my thoughts and speculations (as I’m sure you do, as well). And as I – and many others – have been talking more and more about trying to force a shift in the WordPress economy, this seemed like a timely thing to share.

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When it comes to various business models that surround WordPress plugins, there are normally three types:

1. Completely free
2. Freemium
3. Premium

How a developer opts to publish their plugin is their prerogative, and there are a lot of opinions as to why any one model is better than any of the other models. As with anything, each has its own set of advantages, and each person’s opinion is not necessarily any better than any other person’s opinion.

That said, as someone who has tried all three business models, I have to say that the longer I work in this particular economy, the more I lean towards the third option.

Though I’m not saying I dislike the other two, and though I’m not interested in discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the first two (at least in this post), I am interested in sharing my thoughts on the premium model (or the pay-for-it model or whatever you want to call it.

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If you hang around any group of programmers long enough, you’re bound to get into a discussion as to which language is currently the best language and why that’s the case.

Well. Then again. Maybe not.

I’d say this is true is some cases, but I’d venture to say that if you’re hanging around a group who has been at it for quite some time (read: at least a decade or so), you’re going to have discussions as to what features of what languages are nicer in contrast to features of other languages.

A more mature discussion, right? At least a little.

But then you take this one step further: You sit and chat with a group of people who have been working on the same platform or framework for a while and you may find yourself in a discussion about what features of a given framework has that are better than its alternatives..

Perhaps a better way of putting it is: You may end up discussing why one language, framework, or set of tools encourages better programming practices than any other given set of languages, frameworks or tools.

You know you’ve been there when you can quickly list off several reasons, say, Python programmers prefer white space, Rubyists prefer unit testing, Rails developers appreciate MVC, jQuery developers like method chaining, JavaScript programmers love the prototypal inheritance, and Smalltalk programmers love how few of them exist (I kid, I kid).

On a more serious note, there’s no shying away from the fact that people either love or hate PHP. Sure, there’s middle ground but there’s no fun in taking a stance there so you don’t read many articles on people simply saying “Yeah, I think PHP’s okay.” But when it’s used in the context of another framework like CakePHP or Laravel, then you’re likely to find something different.

So ultimately, I think it’s worth asking the question, does WordPress encourage strong or poor programming practices?

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