I disagree. "Web" part is usually just the UI, exactly how the author views it himself. 10 years ago people did that in Visual Basic (yes, it existed for those

I disagree. "Web" part is usually just the UI, exactly how the author views it himself. 10 years ago people did that in Visual Basic (yes, it existed for those who don't know and was even more popular), but "heavy lifting in the back end" has always been there, just as it is today, along with every imaginable data structure from CS available in some library or another. This is why I don't see what's different. I had a boring VB-Forms job in 97 immediately upon graduation, just like I can have a boring Rails job today. Speaking of optimization: We have plenty of hardware startups here in Austin, where cool guys code in C running under real-time OS and have 4-32MB of total RAM (without paging) with very limited libraries, I bet there are more jobs like this today that there were total programming jobs "back in the day", since number of devices you can code for is growing exponentially. And oh yes, they do have to optimize.