A study of 7,800 households across the nation [1] conducted in late 1939 and early 1940 indicated that the average annual income for all salaried workers in the United States was $1,164. The actual breakdown for average salary was as follows: =========================== Worker Type | Average Salary ————–+——————————- Managerial | $1,581 $25 starting wage in the 40s… 3. Senior Executives | $2,853
In 1936 the average salary was $1,558.21. $1,558.21 is $19,654 in today’s money. In that same year, the average retail price of a new car was just over $600; the average price of a gallon of gas was 27 cents; and you could buy yourself a pair of Adidas athletic shoes for $5.00 (about $72 in today’s money).
Average salary in 1940
The average civilian salary in 1940 was $1,423 (the equivalent of $21,700 in 2015). If that sounds like a princely sum to you, remember that it doesn’t factor in things like taxes and inflation. Additionally, this number is the average for total U.S employees, but most gamers don’t make nearly so much—and studying gaming history certainly isn’t as important as developing sophisticated rocketry or synthetic blood!
The demand for designers was greater than anyone had predicted, and the industry exploded. The average salary of a designer rose with companies willing to pay whatever they needed to in order to attract qualified workers—and much, much more.
At the end of the day, this is just a fun little comparison. But it’s a useful one nonetheless, especially if you’re hoping to get into web design as a career. It’s easy to look at how much money other web designers are making and assume that you’ll be able to make the same kind of cash if you apply for similar jobs. But these comparisons let us take a step back and realize that our years of experience really do count for something, and that we deserve to make more than just an average salary. But there’s plenty of good news as well: according to the BLS, web design was the only IT sub-specialty expected to grow by over 20% in the next year or so. That makes now the perfect time to start your education in web design and increase your chances for success exponentially later on down the line.
The infographic makes a case for how it’s not just the quantity of your work that counts — but the quality. The salary of an individual shouldn’t solely be compared to the number of hours they put in, but also to their level of expertise and previous experience.
ConclusionThis information is interesting, but it’s not all that useful to us. Each post in the series focuses on a different topic, and we got a lot of value out of the authors’ research for each post. But the sum of the parts didn’t add up to much for us. There just wasn’t enough here, despite the amount of data that was collected. We ended up using one cherry-picked stat from the series in our post because, well, we liked it.
