Implies to whom? There are many "web developers" who only know how to make WordPress websites, or Squarespace websites. At my old job at $MEGACORP, I worked alongside many "web developers" who really only knew how to configure SharePoint. Even basic HTML and CSS skills were scarce.
So yeah, I don't think LLMs have changed anything on this front. "Web developer" has never implied expertise to me. "Frontend engineer" perhaps slightly moreso, but even then you gotta really talk to the person to find out what they know or don't know.
Instead, we have a society of marketing and sales. If you can convince someone you can do it, you get the job (both as an employee or as a contractor or as a firm).
I did. But those are trained electricians of course.
But the point is that there is licensure for electricians, who have maintained enough of a guild to defend the value - semantic, yes, but ultimately economic - of the term. That title matters the way this author wants "web developer" to, but "web developer" hasn't, doesn't, and never will again, and that's certainly not going to change in consequence of this author's fundamental misapprehension of genericization as a concept - not the legal principle with respect to trademark, but the underlying human behavior by whose recognition the establishment of that principle was informed.
> I'm currently a Frontend Engineer at [XYZ] (I made the new logo, so I guess I'm technically still a designer, too).
So now I question if what set the author off on bluesky was also said in jest, otherwise his belittling sentiment toward "designers" is similar to his (justified) displeasure for the belittling sentiment towards web devs.
Either way, it is a pretty apparent when someone is inflating themselves with a title they don't deserve. The author is pretty apparently good at what he does and a master in the field but man, folks need to let comments they see on social media go. Imagine being a P5 and a P-20 made a belittling comment. Just go about your day and let your accolades speak for themselves.
And a trained dev can let those through as well, but I really doubt the rate is anywhere close to the same.
I have coworkers that trust their LLM code _way_ too much. It does some great stuff, but I always have to do at least a little bit of cleanup or fixing. The amount of trash AI code I've had to review is kind of upsetting.
Words matter but you need a thousand of them. Someone could say they’re “into rock climbing” but that could mean they climb once a month or they’re obsessed and do it everyday. That’s why we go through interviews or have dates because everything has a certain hard-to-put-into-words nuance.
And that’s why I don’t really care how you use “web developer” as long as you get the general idea.
Lest anyone doesn't believe me, there was a BBC drama called Attachments which had a lot of London new media sceneish stuff going on in it and their team worked in a very similar way to real ones I was on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2rEFvlKA3g (NSFW as most post-watershed shows in 2000 were..)
If you use a legally described title, such as lawyer, MD, OD, electrician, or (in some US states and Canada) engineer, you either have the exact qualifications, or are committing fraud.
If you call yourself an unregulated title, such as web developer, rocket scientist, or landscaper, well, that's just like your opinion, man. And market forces will react; maybe by hiring you; maybe by spreading the word you don't deserve the title.
anticorporate•1h ago
Is a person who can do a WordPress install and extensively customize the theme via WYSIWYG tools a web developer, for example?
I've used the title "web developer" before with hesitation because I'm not at all a front-end guy. I understand CSS conceptually and the markup well enough to usually hack together what I want, but producing a very specific look and feel from a set of design guidelines is a little bit of a stretch for me. Even though I can talk to you all day about server configuration, backend frameworks, DNS, caching, certificates, etc., I always feel like I need to clarify that unless your front end needs are fairly basic, I'm going to need some help. But is that really necessary? Maybe I'm being overly prescriptive.