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Most of the web was built by people who don't know what B-trees are.

By number of sites, perhaps. By revenue, I don't think so. The big names that dominated what the web is to most people certainly do know this stuff, at least insofar as the practical implications, and they try not to hire people that don't for development roles. That isn't to say that they don't also just use Postgres (or Berkeley DB, or whatever) instead of writing their own.

If the automotive industry were like computing, we'd use the phrase "auto mechanic" to refer to...

I totally agree with this - the field could use a few more job titles (and a little less grade inflation - SENIOR software engineer on 2 years experience? Really?) Software Fitter would be a much better description for the skilled assembly role that a lot of modern software boils down to. CRUD Technician is going to to need some PR work though!



>>By number of sites, perhaps. By revenue, I don't think so.

>>Software Fitter would be a much better description for the skilled assembly role that a lot of modern software boils down to. CRUD Technician is going to to need some PR work though!

I don't know why intelligent people with a little knowledge automatically think they are going to be rich. This causes a lot of heart burn and pain to people in later parts of their lives when they figure out things don't work that way in the real world.

Regardless of whatever you may think about them. You may even think them undeserving of all the money they earn, you may think they are stupid. The fact is abstraction enables people to work with a lot of things without knowing much about them in detail. In fact abstractions are invented for that very purpose. So that a million people shouldn't waste their time, energy and effort to relearn things, when all their resources can be better utilized to know just the abstract details and build things on top of it. This enables people to build things quickly on what is already available.

Revenues, money et al are dictated by what the world considers valuable at any time. You might know 1000 algorithms from the book, you might have studied every other data structure that's out there. But if knowing how to write a SQL query is what is valuable in the economy right now, guys doing that are likely to be paid more than you.

This isn't surprising at all. As developers we enjoy a unique position in the market. As for the money we get, compare this with any other industry, our peers working there get paid well less. How is is possible that people who work at the same level of difficult as we do get paid less than us? Because- merely knowing things and difficulty of tasks doesn't qualify for a better compensation.




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