Re: Well ...
It's a quirk of this young industry that people (mainly HR and PHBs) think there's a difference between a "programmer" and a "web programmer". If we decided tomorrow to redo our intra/extranet as an installable program that happens to use the internet for communication, I'd still be one of the ones doing it.
If we were to assume that that programmer had some formal education in programming (computer science, math, EE, etc.), then you might be closer to the truth. My experience has shown that many programmers (and non-programmers, especially) coming from the client/server world stumble quite a bit with the web.
That doesn't mean that web programming is inherently (sp?) than client/server or any other distributed (or non-distributed) model. What it means is that there are plenty of gotchas, and a paradigm of looking at how things work. When I see a client/server programmer (that usually isn't that experienced with programming) start coding for the web, they make all sorts of mistakes (such as over-using session objects, organizing pages incorrectly, organizing forms improperly, etc.). The same would go for doing the reverse. If you took a web programmer and threw him/her at a CORBA project, many mistakes will be made. And that's assuming some training. Given *enough* training, and that may not be a problem...but, then, if you've got special training, you're more than a general purpose programmer (or a web-specific or RPC-specific programmer).
With better and better tools, though, those mistakes lessen (and possibly go away). That type of development becomes commoditized (meaning that new college graduates can do it for a lot less money). Web development is certainly headed that way. Of course, there will always be the "more difficult" types of things to do, which will require a more experienced individual, but as the maturation of the "subindustry" grows, the need for those types of individuals lessens.
I can read the writing on the wall for what I do...and, hence, I'm working to move beyond it. I've already become too expensive as a simple programmer. For most things, somewhat that's a lot cheaper can do it just as well (or, at least, good enough and fast enough). I'm not going to compete on speed (there's no way to really use that in an interview, and I don't want to work that way), and if my specialized knowledge isn't needed, I'm not (and I don't believe in hording it, so it's easier to work myself out of a job).
Dan
