[badatshipping]

This just shows how shallow web programming is in intellectual content. If your expertise consists of stuff that can be looked up on the fly, all you need to join the field is a high enough IQ to comprehend those ideas at all. There’s no need for deep thinking or mastery.

In what other technical field can you simply google everything? And is that because other fields are merely more obscure, or because they’re actually harder? Could one be a mathematician or physicist by googling things?

[ben509]

As someone who works on math intensive back-end stuff, and routinely can't google things, I'll defend web-devs:

Most occupations are not intellectual in the slightest, nor do they require a high IQ. They do require other talents, though, such as a sense of aesthetics or technical ability, in this case.

Not being intellectually rigorous doesn't mean they don't require careful thought or mastery.

I could absolutely perform any of the individual steps required to design a website, and have done this. But I either rely on somebody else's template or my designs tend to look like shit. Mostly, I think, the sheer patience to tweak CSS, let alone testing it on a dozen browsers and mobile devices, is often beyond me. Or (Christ, be my shield) dealing with end users.

The simple act of repetitively designing many hundreds of websites and then getting feedback from actual people as to how they work with those sites, that is mastery and it does take careful thought. So, yes, they're constantly looking up "recipes" to combine into code.

Speaking as someone who is on the "tool-making" side of the house, that's the point. I want to make tools that other people can use and combine into new things; if I write a compiler, the goal is that someone can use it without having to learn compiler theory.

[badatshipping]

I understand the point you’re making here, but having done webdev for about five years now this has just not been the experience of me or anyone I know. Admittedly, limited sample size and all.

The simple act of repetitively designing many hundreds of websites and then getting feedback from actual people as to how they work with those sites, that is mastery and it does take careful thought. So, yes, they're constantly looking up "recipes" to combine into code.

If I were at a party I would appreciate my job being described this way, but the reality is that webdev is mostly applied common sense + having a lot of the kind of knowledge that is googlable. Like, I’m successful career wise and I’m regarded as being quite good at my job, yet I don’t feel like I’ve mastered anything per se.

Whereas for my side project, an IDE for Golang, I feel I’ve actually had to learn difficult concepts that couldn’t be re-learned from a blog post.

I take back what I said about webdev not requiring thought, which was an exaggeration.

[Edmond]

Maybe referring to Physicists and Mathematicians googling is a bit glib but almost certainly they do a whole lot of "Googling" by way of being familiar with what others have done...it is the only way to be effective.

Knowing how to quickly find what you need is not in conflict with mastery...besides, we are talking about web apps here, most dev teams wont have much patient with a developer spending a ton of time reinventing wheels when there are ready-made solutions.

[faissaloo]

>This just shows how shallow web programming is in intellectual content.

Not really, the same rule applies for a hell of alot of other things.

>And is that because other fields are merely more obscure, or because they’re actually harder? It's simply because other fields don't have the same knowledge sharing culture and you end up having to use SciHub and doing the knowledge sharing yourself.

>Could one be a mathematician or physicist by googling things?

I think a number of fundamental cultural problems with mathematics needs to be fixed before this is viable for the broader population, but I do think it may become the case over time.