> when I told other software people I’m a web developer, I got treated like shit. I was a lower class of coder because I wasn’t “solving cool problems” because making web sites is easy.

Of all the stupid arrogant awfulness in tech that has crossed my path this one is definitely high on the list of the most baffling. Web dev is the hardest and most intimidating dev work I've ever done, by a country mile.

(Whether that complexity is 'justified' is an entirely different discussion that, while no doubt interesting, has nothing to do with this person's post)

BurningFrog

The problem is that you're both right.

Putting up a simple web site that does something basic, that you then walk away from is easy, and is what a lot of people who call themselves web developers do.

Building something like Gmail or Facebook OTOH are endeavors only slightly below the moon landing in complexity and “solving cool problems”.

And it is equally legitimately "web development"...

algeom

Can you explain what you mean when you compare Gmail and Facebook to the moon landing? On its face that comment looks way out of whack to someone who is outside the tech industry.

alangpierce

Obviously software was totally different back then, and Apollo 11 was much more than a software project, but FWIW the Apollo guidance computer software was 130416 lines of assembly[1][2], while Facebook is probably at least 100 million lines of code at this point[3]. Also note that Facebook uses languages that are much more expressive than assembly, so "1000x as much code" probably indicates much more than 1000x as much logic being expressed. The reason Facebook and Gmail seem relatively simple is because they're designed to feel simple so they can be used by regular people, but the full implementation details are very, very complex.

[1] https://qz.com/726338/the-code-that-took-america-to-the-moon...

[2] https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11

[3] https://www.quora.com/How-many-lines-of-code-is-Facebook