I think that no matter where you are as a programmer, you're part of the plumbing crowd whether you like it or not. If you hack together websites using a web fr

I think that no matter where you are as a programmer, you're part of the plumbing crowd whether you like it or not. If you hack together websites using a web framework like Rails or whatever, then that web framework is likely your plumbing. If however you write a web framework, then the language (Ruby, etc) is your plumbing. Those who write languages have operating systems and those who write operating systems have hardware. Even hardware has different levels of abstraction in it from folks designing instruction sets down to folks who have to actually deal with the physics of circuits on silicon. The things is though, a lot of those folks wouldn't be able to deal with the stuff that a typical web developer deals with because they don't understand the domain. Writing a highly performant web server is a different task from writing a complete web application that uses that web server. I think that's it's useful to have a deeper understanding of the tools we use, but ultimately we all have to work at the level of abstraction that makes sense for the work we do and that's not a problem.