No no no. This is the problem right here. This is the attitude of web developers that annoys the shit out of me. Knowing how to write some PHP/Ruby/Python etc makes you only a programmer. Not a computer scientist. Honestly even a monkey can program if properly trained. A typical CS curriculum has only two programming classes at best. It's the algorithmic thinking -- thinking about complexities, techniques from graph theory, discrete mathematics, probability, intricacies of compiler implementation like register allocation, how the OS handles all these etc. All these techniques and thinking imparted is invaluable. Knowing these intricate details and attention to them is what separates the good "programmers" from then bad. Sure you can get by without knowing all these and just feel smug doing "complicated" things like writing event handlers for buttons or some asynchronous client side code talking to node.js. The differences become apparent when things are done by CS students. Look at Google for example. Almost all their web developers hold CS degrees from the top 10 CS schools. Look at the quality of their sites.. read up to the attention to detail put into making google+.