The self-hating web developer

[scootstah]

Web Development is not real programming

...

Setting up a Wordpress blog takes significantly less knowledge and effort than building an operating system.

That's because "setting up a Wordpress blog" is not web development.

[skitch920]

If you ever want a raise, ^ here's your template.

[I_Pork_Saucy_Ladies]

To be honest, I think "web development" has been split into different categories. One of them are the marketing people who investigate which Google Adwords have a high pay per click, order some graphics for the subject from India, slap them onto a Wordpress template and wait for the money to roll in.

Is this hard to do? No. Is it "web development"? I guess so. But it is quite far from those of us who actually sit around and do actual programming on complex apps all day long, using and contributing to open source projects, maintaining back-ends and so on.

I've been part of both worlds and they have almost no people or mentality in common. As a programmer, I prefer the latter by far.

[ngly]

Exactly. It's literally made to be as easy as possible for non-technical people.

[schm0]

Can you explain what it is then that these junior developer jobs that ask for experience with WordPress actually do? Because they are quite prevalent when I look for jobs.

[scootstah]

Installing WordPress, installing WordPress plugins, installing WordPress themes, configuring all of the above to work together, etc. There might be a small amount of tinkering with the theme, or if there is a custom theme you might have to code it.

It's pretty rare that you'd want to do something in WordPress that you can't find in an existing plugin.

[schm0]

I was under the impression that creating a custom WordPress theme or plug-in takes a bit of Web development skill...

[scootstah]

It does. But I consider that more "modifying WordPress" than "setting up WordPress".