> I don't doubt that there are junior web developers who don't know much better.
I just think it's very... puritanical the way that people bemoan the state of websites as a personal failing of web developers as a profession rather than the a result of what kind of deliverables their employers care about and are willing to pay for.
> Every business needs a bespoke website, so all the web developers have plenty of work.
Not sure this is reality; or that a meritocracy for webdevs exists.
In recent years, it seems the quality of big "prestige brand" websites (not exactly big tech) is declining, to the point of being unusable on mobile browsers or throttled connections. Not because of technical trade-offs, but reliance on frameworks to achieve "demoable effects" instead of real world features or usability.
We're more than fifteen years into "ajax" and today's kids simply can't do it without burning 10x the cpu cycles and bandwidth. To me it seems there is a decoupling between the utility of webdevs and their pay, and some sort of market failure is occurring.
Good, you deserve a slap for being self-satisfied about it. There are loads of fully competent and skilled web developers out there with great, in-depth CS knowledge, and publicly berating them achieves nothing.
Web development is interesting, because it tends to mix in people from a lot of different backgrounds — in particular, some of them come through the design side, and move down the stack. That's good, because it demonstrates the accessibility and flexibility of the stack; it's bad because it can result in suboptimal solutions to common problems.
I agree with the sentiment. I've been in a Magento and WordPress shop where I had to implement badly written plugins that my boss payed money for. I've seen people come out of code bootcamps calling themselves developers and all they can do is implement a design spec with HTML, SCSS, and jQuery. Yes, I taught myself a few programming languages,but I put in the work and effort to make my skills worth the time to an employer. We shouldn't lower the barrier only to call whomever can get past it with the low-level skills an expert in the field.
i agree with the point of the article (i.e., web developers are not stupid)
i'd say that the real issue is that there are lots of good web developers, and they are all are under wraps by big companies, doing the things that they like for a big salary. the bad ones need work, so they're very prolific with their presence and marketing.
There are people who suck at their jobs in every industry. My wider point is that the skills required for a good web developer is vastly different than, say, a compiler dev. The latter is not a “webdev who is a better developer”, they need much more business-knowledge, understanding what the client meant, predicting future requirements, etc.
This is an entirely new business domain, it’s not really trying to be the same.
I would amend this and say, "in the wrong hands, and with insufficient experience, Web development is bizarre and overly complex"
Yes granted, there's loads of competing frameworks and technologies but I've worked with experienced web developers who can read through the marketing, understand the problems they are solving and just get stuff done.
I agree with this entirely, and I fully understand that web development represents a tiny slice of coding generally and that what I've presented is a tiny fraction of what you need to learn to be a good web developer.
I plan to edit the post a little to reflect what people have said. Hope the title wasn't too misleading.
It sounds like you are implying that web developers are beneath you. Building web based software is more complex than slapping together some HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
If no web developer is happy with garbage, why do the majority of sites resemblance a dumpster fire?
I'll fully back the claim the rank and file web developers are idiots. But primarily because the smart ones would never consider themselves just 'web developers'.
The problem with web development isn't that there is a resurgence of bad development practices. It's that the average web developer isn't as skilled as what they need to be.
The average U.S. worker spends 4.6 years in a given career, and yet it takes ~5 years to master a framework. The average computer science grad earns much more than a web developer, so the skill set required for proper development is often lacking. Add into the mix cheap offshore labour, poorly made "out of the box" web packages aimed at medium-small business, and inexperienced "geeks" who build poor websites on the cheap.
Given the skill set required for professional level web development is on par with software development, it's no surprise the role isn't getting the skilled people the career requires.
> I don't doubt that there are junior web developers who don't know much better.
I just think it's very... puritanical the way that people bemoan the state of websites as a personal failing of web developers as a profession rather than the a result of what kind of deliverables their employers care about and are willing to pay for.
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