Every time I hear coding referred to as a craft I sort of hate it. On one hand I love the idea of it being a highly skilled craft - knowing the intricacies of the language and the machine to solve any problem, being a respected expert, producing a product worthy of pride. On the other hand, most of what we do is display [some content] on [some page] (probably sloppily due to deadlines), or print 100 random entries from a file...
Not really. My skills have drastically declined over the years because I rarely get a chance to exercise them. On top of that, it seems I'm switching languages/stacks frequently. So it's more like I'm a carpenter for a little while, then a plumber, then an electrician.
I wouldn't expect a carpenter to be skilled with a draw knife without substantial experience using it. The tools you use have a large impact on your performance. Same is true for software when it comes to understanding the intricacies of the tools, which is especially needed when troubleshooting odd issues.
I still maintain that switching from front end Angular to backend data engineering is more like switching from electrician to carpenter. They're both builders, but their tools and objectives are very different. If one doesn't see that, I question how deep into the craft they really are.
Yes, you can go very deep in both front and back end. But the concepts are almost the same... as someone that has had "careers" doing both pixel perfect UIs and large distributed systems on the backend (hundreds of machines, millions of events a second, blahblah).
You can definitely be skilled in a certain tool (language, framework) and that is valuable.
Or you can be the shallow generalist (handyman) running around doing whatever. But the specialist (electrician) is gonna make more than you installing the same outlets.
