[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.