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It has been my experience in agencies that designers are often the guys running the show at larger companies, with development often viewed as a commodity that
by EnderMB 14y ago
It has been my experience in agencies that designers are often the guys running the show at larger companies, with development often viewed as a commodity that is nice to have in-house, but could be traded away to another agency with little difficulty.
As an example, a guy I know that is now a director at a London based agency is hiring a Head of User Experience/Design, and a Head of Development. The design role requires many years of experience with large brands, leading projects, experience working with board members/multiple stakeholder environments with a salary range from £65-80k a year. The development role requires the same amount of experience as a developer; leading projects and people, but has a salary of £50-65k. This seems fairly common across agencies in London and with the pay scale lowered seems about the same in cities like Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham, etc.
A company like Airbnb is going to be entirely different from the norm, but this is already common practice across many other agencies. The rise of Apple has done a lot for creatives, possibly a lot more than the technical might of companies like Microsoft and Google have done for developers.
- lusr 14y agoIs this agency you refer to a marketing or design agency? If so, this data point is most likely somewhat deceptive. The core competency of a marketing or design agency is creative work, and naturally you want exceptional talent in that respect. Such an agency is generally going to be building straightforward websites that don't require particularly skillful software engineering. (And even if they did, it'd be an option to contract out, whereas contracting creativity out is not - as far as I know - a real option.) If you look at the salary of an equivalent "Head of Development" and "Head of User Experience/Design" at e.g. Microsoft I suspect you'll see the opposite salary situation because of the relative focus of the organisation (although Microsoft is putting a lot of emphasis on design these days so who knows?).
- EnderMB 14y agoI should have been clearer. Both examples market themselves as full-service agencies. You're absolutely right that creative and marketing agencies skew their pay towards the creative and business sides. Sadly, in my experience, a lot of full-service agencies side towards creatives over developers, both in pay scale and decision making. I've known a few Technical Directors that seem to be equal in name only, and are often restricted solely to purely technical subjects.