It's funny, when I was first learning programming 15 years ago, the thing I heard everywhere was "webdev is easy and for noobs", and sure, it was 15 years ago a

It's funny, when I was first learning programming 15 years ago, the thing I heard everywhere was "webdev is easy and for noobs", and sure, it was 15 years ago and webdev has come a long way... but when I interview the fresh-out-of-college candidates for junior positions, there's still the elitism of "If you aren't managing memory and flipping bits you aren't a REAL programmer." No, most web developers aren't implementing the most complex and intricate algorithms or 'close to the metal' or whatever other gatekeeping people want to claim, but that doesn't mean it's easy work. I've never had a job where I didn't see some green engineer laugh off a feature request with "Oh, that's easy, it's just calling an API and putting the information into some HTML, what's so hard about that?" and then getting stuck when their first implementation fails QA, or the product manager explains that the customer needs it to be ever so slightly different, and the complexity of those edge cases turn out to not be so easy to deal with as the world of perfect computer science might suggest. Is it hard in the same way? No, I will fully admit that coming up with a novel algorithmic solution requires a different mindset and brilliance that very few, if any, really good web developers I've met really have (although I'm certain there are people who excel at both, they're rare enough that I haven't been lucky enough to encounter them). But being really good at building a solid, secure, modern website isn't easy either, and it's also valuable. This post focused on the complexity of the tooling, which yes, is definitely a thing, but if you don't know web development, and you know that you don't know web development, why are you attempting to build something using complex high level tools designed for and used by advanced web developers? Then again, if you don't know web development and you don't know what you don't know, and you've just heard 'Django is good' how would you know to maybe pick Flask or something simpler to understand? I don't have an answer or a larger point other than this: writing software is difficult and complex and none of us should look down on anyone else because what they do seems easy on the outside.