What is my worth as a web developer?

Question

Am I 18 years old, and other than working over summer with a local development firm (who have given me a good reference), I don't have much experience working in an actual physical commercial environment.

Having said that, I have 6 years experience (yes, 6, despite being 18) in PHP/HTML/Javascript, 3 years in Python (web applications, video processing servers, chat daemons, libraries, everything), 4 years in Java (again, web applications, network servers, plugins for games and other servers, utility desktop applications for myself), 2 years experience in C#, and I consider myself to be very, very good at what I do.

I've built web applications from scratch that look great, work great and have literally hundreds of thousands of users across the world. I've scaled a media host that I wrote from scratch (including network servers to bulk-process videos for video hosting, distribution of image storage so it could handle the load) that literally was having tens of *thousands* of image loads *per second*, and still running great.

I run a web game that has thousands of active players (sampled from the last week), and do a good bit of PHP/Java/Python freelancing in my spare time, and have received good feedback (and payments) for those projects.

I consider myself to be a very good web developer, with a lot of experience in really developing sites from the ground up, scaling them and managing them across multiple servers and having them used by tens, if tens, if not hundreds of thousands of different people.

But, I'm 18. And I don't have a university degree.

My question is - with all this experience and knowledge, what is my worth to a local (Northern Ireland/UK) employer as a web developer? What sort of salary should I expect from a company for what I can offer? Will major companies, such as Google, consider me?

Thanks

Answer 1

You know many degree holders dont have as much knowledge as you have. Hats off to you for achieving that much in little age.

I know the commercial world. Here only your skill and experience is considered. You will waste your time if you work for second grade companies. I will suggest you that you should only work for big brands like google microsoft and yahoo or others.

Answer 2

Yeah I'm 17 and I would consider myself to be in a similar situation.



I would suggest if you put together an impressive portfolio, they would completely ignore your education. A friend of mine that developed the Dizzler media site said he applied for Facebook and left the education section blank and they still interviewed his skills live in a Teamviewer type thing.



So just put a professional portfolio together and remember that you don't have to make a generic resume. Just look up creative resumes and you'll see what I mean.



So my final answer would simply just be you're as worthy if not more to a person with a 4-year degree in web design/programming and probably web administration too. Pretty awesome.

Take my words with salt since I'm not exactly in the industry either(haha); and good luck to you.

Answer 3

No, if I have been you I might wait a different 18 to 24 months. Vista is throwing up plenty of issues. Have a seem on the quantity of questions / issues individuals are having with Vista on Yahoo Answers. I you bear in mind whilst XP got here out it took two years for the entire issues to be solved, two provider packs and many others. Software designers and many others are nonetheless discovering issues with Vista. If I have been you I might wait, it is just a question of time whilst Microsoft begin liberating fixes, Vista provider packs and many others. Your internet growth is not going to, from what I can see, might be helped with Vista.