[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.