Not all web developers are "plumbers". If you are working on websites with heavy traffic, then you need to use complex algorithms to scale. That needs someone who is comfortable with algorithms, and that needs a quite lot of thought.
The author describes simple CRUD websites and then equates all of web development to trivial tasks like that. Even scaling simple CRUD needs a lot skills, intelligence and ingenuity.
And talking of design, there is a reason some pieces of art are valued so much. A designer who designs a great website is an artist too, and deserves as much compensation.
Engineering the plumbing systems for the burj requires a different set of skills, but it's not done by plumbers. The actual plumbing part is pretty much the same as in any structure.
I agree. There are some that are worth a lot of money. But to be worth that kind of money you need deep domain knowledge. I won't pay $120/hr for someone to tinker with jQuery. I will pay that for a machine learning specialist.
The fact is that 'coders' are today's version of auto mechanics in the 70s. The barrier to entry is low- an old box, a linux distro, google- and off you go. So everybody who can't do something else can give it a try. Some will fail; some will succeed at a low level, and a few may find their calling. And a lot of people will pay for it because they don't know the difference.
But the one's who are truly good- who obtain that domain knowledge- are valuable. In their domain.
Perhaps you've been very lucky or found some especially naive people (right out of grad school, perhaps). Your rates immediately struck me as the kind of rate you would quote if you'd never, in fact, tried to hire somebody skilled. I allow the possibility you have been lucky and successful.
In general you'll be paying upwards of $250/hr for a machine learning specialist (sometimes upwards of $500/hr if they have a modicum of talent and experience) and more than $120/hr for a front-end webdev who can claim anything more than "I've heard of jQuery." Those are contracting rates of course; hiring somebody at salary has its own costs.
You caught me: I've not hired a domain expert coder. But I've also not paid $120/hr for front-end coders. I over-paid for one guy who knew far less than I did- horrible coding practice, always thought he was farther along on the project than he really was (and wanted money), and, in fact, never got far enough to even understand the problem before I terminated the agreement.
For $120/hr the person isn't fiddling- they've done it before, probably have a personal library they can pull, and a basic shell of a website can be ready pretty quickly. Their time is almost entirely spent on the custom part of the site.
Still it doesn't necessarily pay. There is a very large productivity gap between different people, for different tasks in software development (in the 1-50x range).
The fact you think price per hour is directly correlated with total cost to achieve a good result
I don't believe that. My point is that some web/coding skills are not that difficult to achieve, and those skills don't fetch seasoned defense-lawyer rates. At least, not from me.
I'm not sure using increasingly complex algorithms makes a programmer move into some kind of new title bracket. You are still a "plumber", you just have to use more complicated distribution systems to deal with the increased building size (to stick with the analogy).
The author describes simple CRUD websites and then equates all of web development to trivial tasks like that. Even scaling simple CRUD needs a lot skills, intelligence and ingenuity.
And talking of design, there is a reason some pieces of art are valued so much. A designer who designs a great website is an artist too, and deserves as much compensation.