Is a college education necessary to become a great web developer?

These days, many people are thinking about getting into web development. The job prospect for web developers is better than that of almost any other profession, with expected growth rates of over 20% over the next 5 years.

Salaries are equally attractive: the median hourly wages for web developers in the US is almost $35/hr, which equals to over $72,000 a year. And many developers exceed this salary by far. With those numbers in mind, most experts agree that a good web developer will have no problem finding well-paid work in the near future. What’s more, web development offers great opportunities of working from home (or a local café) by becoming a freelancer. A recent survey revealed that over 7% of developers are freelancing, and this number is likely to go up.

So with all of the benefits, becoming a web developer is clearly a very attractive prospect. But the $72,000 question is, what are the requirements to becoming a developer? Do you need a bachelor’s degree, or a Ph.D. even? Or can you teach yourself, learning everything you need online? We took a look at the state of the industry and asked CTOs of different companies about how they wound up in their positions.

Let’s go!

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5 essential skills every web developer should have

Web development continues to be one of the hottest industries around, and it’s not about to change anytime soon. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment of web developers is projected to grow 27 percent from 2014 to 2024, which is much faster than the average for all occupations.

With that in mind, we thought we’d put together a list of essential skills that every web developer should have. Knowing what to improve is the starting point to achieving greatness, so we hope you find some useful information on web developer skills in this post.

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The 10 most interesting web development questions on Quora

You have a question. Quora might have the answer.

We are always interested in what other professionals are thinking about web development ideas. To get some more insight, we took a look at some of the most interesting web development questions people have asked on Quora.

There are thousands of questions and answers to explore on Quora. Here are 10 to get you started!

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7 outstanding female CTOs you should follow

This article is brought to you by Usersnap, your solution for building great digital projects. Get a 15-day free trial here.

It’s a sad fact that the tech industry is still vastly dominated by men. Currently, women hold only around 25% of all tech jobs. The number is even smaller for management roles. Only 14% of all CTO positions in tech companies belong to women. You’d think with all the innovative products, ideas and technologies launched every day, the tech industry would have figured out gender equality. Well, it hasn’t. As technology keeps advancing into every aspect of our lives, this is something that has to change. It is more important than ever to make women seen and female voices heard.

Today, we want to present you 7 outstanding female CTOs. These women are leading the way for women in tech in 2017 and beyond.

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How to Onboard Your Newly-Hired Developers

There’s nothing worse than feeling you are wasting your time. Imagine putting all your time, energy, and resources into hiring someone and then they quit within a few months. You know those target posters you can put on the wall that say ‘Bang Head Here’? I’ve needed one many times. Hiring and retaining good developers is a cumbersome business. You do it, but sometimes all you can do is shake your head and stare at that poster.

Over the years, I’ve found that hiring developers and bringing them into an agile team requires them being supported by an agile talent acquisition system and excellent onboarding. In fact, new employees who go through a structured onboarding program are 58% more likely to be with the organization after three years. If you want to wrap your head around how important this is just imagine the financial and emotional impact of replacing people in your team every year.

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A guide to building browser notifications

This article is brought to you by Usersnap – a visual feedback & bug tracking tool, used by software companies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.

As more and more of our beloved apps run solely in the browser, we as users are beginning to rely on browser notifications to get updates on new activities.

In this article, I’m going to provide you with the best practices for developing and designing web push notifications.
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Hiring developers is hard. Here’s what we learned in the last 3 years.

No matter to whom in tech I talk to. Most people and tech companies seem to struggle with hiring developers.

And since I have the feeling that hiring is a topic that doesn’t get too much talk and attention (maybe because of people struggling with it), I think it’s our obligation to share the biggest lessons we’ve learned at Usersnap.
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User offboarding: How to end relationships with your users!

There’s a ton of great content out there on how to onboard new users, how to treat them well, and how to make sure that they understand your product, its benefits, and become paying customers.

However, there’s less information available on how you should treat your users who want to end the relationship with you.

We at Usersnap looked into the topic of user offboarding and provide you with the following essentials for how to end relationships with your customers and users.

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