[benjaminwootton]

I would argue that it's possible for even an average web developer to create at least a comparable amount of economic value as the doctor or lawyer.

I don't know why our own community find this hard to accept?

We're a rare species who can create massive value for ourselves or our employers. We can build great products that many would pay for, or automate away whole departments of people with our code - not that I take any pleasure from the latter.

And yet we tacitly accept that there should be a whole class of people above us who have the right to earn more because they ground it out at school for a few years?

[PixelPusher]

An average web developer in no way can compare to a lawyer or a doctor.

First of all, doctors generally save lives. And they have to go to school for at least 8 years. Lawyers, almost just as long.

How long does it take to learn Rails, HTML, and Javascript? A few months?

Average web developers are not that special. However, great engineers for whom Rails is an afterthought compared to what they know, are indeed comparable.

[zalew]

a web dev who doesn't know databases is like [some creative analogy about a doctor hurting people]

[doktrin]

It's practically impossible to be a web developer without knowing anything about databases.

Most of the topics the parent listed are significantly more complex than "knowing about databases", which implies that "database design" in this context isn't simply drawing an ER diagram and correctly identifying the purpose of a foreign key.

Given that the other topics listed include sockets, parallelism & map reduce, my guess is that "database design" might in this case mean distributed database concepts and/or sharding.