[onion2k]

Someone who works primarily on small javascript web applications has a really different job from someone who works on a large application built on a LAMP stack, or someone who writes complex iOS applications, or someone designs self-driving car software for Google, or someone who works on embedded software for pacemakers, or someone who writes operating systems or designs programming languages.

Do they?

If your job is primarily about taking other people's work and writing code based on it then, in my opinion, you don't really build software. You write code. There's nothing whatsoever wrong with that, but it's definitely different. Building software is much more than writing code.

Software development is working out what a problem is, what the solution to the problem is, and how to implement that solution on a computer. There should be time spent talking to users, gathering requirements, writing specifications, designing a user experience, developing a test strategy, thinking about stuff, writing documentation, and, at the end, a bit of coding. The non-coding side of software development isn't especially different between specialisms. So, really, software development in the sense of everything necessary to make a piece of software does require approximately the same set of skills.

That said though, the knowledge required in any given part of the software industry is very different. A web developer needs to know very different things to someone doing graphics or embedded development.

[dasboth]

The software development aspect that you describe cannot be taught at a boot camp. I think the people claiming you can learn to code in a day mean (or think they mean) the coding part, and probably don't realise there's all that other stuff on top of it.

I would like to emphasise the last point you made. The coding skills, while broadly similar, are still different in each of those specialisms. Learning how to write effective code for a pacemaker is very different from writing a Ruby on Rails web app. They're both "coding" and you need the same kind of abstract thought, but you need to understand very different things to be good at them.