I'm one of the editors on this — and would be happy to answer any questions...<p>To address the obvious: It's <i>a lot of data</i>. A pixel (roughly) for each of the 255 industries we chose to cover the private sector, for each month, for each of the past ten years. Sadly, it may bring your browser to its knees. I've tried some tricks to try and keep things moving along smoothly, but if anyone has any brilliant perf. ideas that aren't already incorporated, I'm all ears.
The scroll effects at the top of the page make my browser weep. I keep getting stuck in weird half-states with the charts moving in and out of the intro text. The hovers are quite laggy. This is Chrome on a Macbook Pro.
Interestingly the average salary for "computer systems design and programming" has gone down whilst the number of jobs have gone up.<p>Says a lot about the motives of the "altruistic" individuals who permeate the myth that "everyone can code."
At the very end:<p><i>The graph at the top of this page includes line charts for each industry, shaped by their change in employment over the last decade. The individual lines are placed on the x axis (horizontally) based on the average wages paid in that industry. They are placed on the y axis (vertically) based on the percentage change in employment since the start of the recession in December 2007.</i><p>If you scroll past the initial confusion, you get to all of the graphs plotted separately with nice titles.
I really enjoyed this, and thought the data was well presented. The first few graphs with the hundreds of lines were definitely more confusing (I didn't parse out the lower/higher wages aspect at first pass), but the walkthrough of all major industries with the dozens of subcategories as individual plots was quite interesting and clear.
I like the intent of this chart, but the Y-axis is a mess. Combining percent change from 2007 (as units for the y-axis) with roll-overs of actual numbers that contain data pre-2007 is very unintuitive.