James Somers questions the value of his field:
We call ourselves web developers, software engineers, builders, entrepreneurs, innovators. We’re celebrated, we capture a lot of wealth and attention and talent. We’ve become a vortex on a par with Wall Street for precocious college grads.
But we’re not making the self-driving car. We’re not making a smarter pill bottle. Most of what we’re doing, in fact, is putting boxes on a page. Users put words and pictures into one box; we store that stuff in a database; and then out it comes into another box. … I do most of that work with a tool called Ruby on Rails. … And the important thing to understand is that I am merely a user of this thing. I didn’t make it. I just read the instruction manual.
Update from a reader:
I’ve been a web developer since the late ’90s. James Somers is accurately describing a small percentage of the web development world that is unfortunately blown out of proportion by lazy sensationalist writers. While I am sure that there are people burning VC money on lavish salaries for guys to put boxes on pages that’s not how it goes where I work. But hey, Somers is an expert who works in the industry so obviously his take on it must be accurate, right?
As Mr. Somers has observed in response to being called out for his poorly-written screed, there are a lot of companies out there doing real work, making products that perform valuable and necessary services, and without skilled web developers that wouldn’t be possible. Mr. Somers also falsely implies that all it takes to succeed in this field is the ability to read a manual. That’s a bit like saying all it takes for an attorney to be successful is to have the ability to read a law book, or for an accountant to be successful the ability to do math. Where I work the developers have to actually know how to think and solve problems, and they must pass non-trivial coding tests to get hired. It’s damn tough to find qualified applicants for our numerous open engineering roles, where we wade through dozens of resumes from wannabe web devs to find the few who know what they’re doing.
Another:
The thing about programming is if you’re good at it, it’s gonna be really hard to imagine why other people aren’t. There’s this problem that a lot of companies use to test candidates, writing a program that can play FizzBuzz, and a shockingly large number of applicants fail it. As far as I’m concerned you should be able to do that on your very first day programming, but there you have it. I suspect something similar is going on with Somers, along with the all-too-common refrain that if it’s not ground-breaking it must not be worthwhile. Even if he were right, there are still a lot of people in the world who need boxes put on their webpages and clearly not everyone can do it for themselves. (Otherwise, they wouldn’t pay a lot of money to hire web developers to do it for them.) Sometimes these boxes are in the service of something really important and sometimes they aren’t, and that’s completely irrelevant to whether web developers should be making that much money making them. They make that much money because their skills are in demand and supply is scarce. Either programming is harder than we think or other people have mysteriously failed to catch on.
The Dish 