nofearinc

I don't mind the job being done by people building products with visual tools. I just believe that the "developer" title has a unified and consistent meaning across different platforms, languages, communities and what not, and new types of services (like composing elements with visual builders) need a new title to avoid ambiguity - say, site builders, webmasters, implementers, super admins or so forth.

That would be more than sufficient - creating a new job group for people with similar skills and service offerings, allowing SMB clients to reach out to those and large businesses connecting with developers.

most _capable_ people selling WordPress nowadays don't sell WordPress itself, but a solution, purely because of the bad rap and the "WordPress developers" out there. I personally don't feel comfortable being "ashamed" of what I work because of the fact that 9 out of 10 people out on the street sell WordPress websites and claim that they are developers.

And I don't see a reason to switch to a more elitist community just to avoid the ones who've intruded or don't know better due to the lack of educational resources and standards.

Precisely. I wouldn't care if it was 0.01% of the "developers" in WordPress. But when it's the vast majority, actual developers become a limited and hardly visible minority.

I get your point and I'd genuinely apologize to every architect graduate (in the construction space) who feels insulted by that.

Even if my day-to-day follows the "software architect" definition, I would gladly replace it with something closer to the technical field if it wasn't polluted by the majority of people mislabeling themselves. Which is more or less the point of the post.

Agreed with all of the above. I'm even surprised that more of the "hardcore devs" didn't get annoyed by WordPress crossing the 25% web market share a week ago. I can see how more and more large businesses turn to WordPress to cut license costs, decrease salaries, reduce development time and invest more in marketing/advertisement instead.

That comment is also for everyone who mentioned that the post reflects only to the state of a single business instead of an entire community, ecosystem and the business of web development as a whole.

Other than the bulleted list I linked a few articles as well, including the problem with having to educate the customers. While education is always required, most of the "developers" underprice the market, sell unstable solutions and so on. A lot of enterprise customers avoid WordPress as being unreliable and hard to find a reliable team for, which leads to other problems.

We do have a decent business strategy that seems to be working and have some high-end clients (including banks, automotive manufacturers, SaaS providers), but our growth is somewhat constrained due to the limited opportunities thanks to the bad rap of the platform, hiring is incredibly challenging, selling to enterprises has an added overhead and so on. And yes, we can switch to another platform, but I do believe that a few actionable steps (like settings standards and simply separating site builders from developers) can solve many of those problems.

I believe that what walod refers to is the astounding number of people calling themselves "developers" while installing vanilla WordPress with a few plugins and a theme, and changing a few admin options. There's certainly nothing wrong in using WordPress as a framework (which many of us do to cut down time wasted on building CRUD and ACL and DB layers etc), it's just that now everyone is suddenly a WordPress developer once they know how to install WordPress from the web host's admin panel.

A few ideas:

1) A public list of recognized job titles (think of an employment bureau catalog or else) that defines the job description by an authority. At least a reference that most would pay attention to.

2) A unified training program for each branch (or developers in question) outlining the required skills or targets for developers

3) A WordPress.org profile that showcases the work in a better manner - think of a GitHub/LinkedIn version in the WordPress context

I also wouldn't necessarily vouch for a licensing program (probably commercial/financial interests), but some standardization and guidelines could help immensely and solve various problems for employers, clients, expert and beginner developers, site builders, even users.

I couldn't agree more. But people need to make a living, and often loud folks take over an ecosystem if they are allowed to do so, and without standardization or a way to verify skills, we'll turn into the Internet marketing community which is flooded with self-titled marketing gurus - but at least their job requires them to be super visible and exposed so it's way easier to verify their credentials and/or skills.

Two of the problems we struggle with here as technical people:

1) You receive hundreds of spam applications even if you mention explicitly code-related stuff - like GitHub/Bitbucket repo, years of programming experience, know-how in TDD, we sometimes experiment with continuous integration experience or others. The wave comes as long as you mention WordPress.

2) Other than the spam applications and standard "bots", many people simply don't know what's included in "developer" or what real "developers" do. Even if they do want to learn and get better, they don't know the limits and can't aim higher than they are.

WordPress Core developer is standard, but my business for example is building large multisite solutions for enterprise clients and while I do have 30+ patches in Core, that's not what I do for a living and can't compare with those who do that 40+ hours a week

Correct - 500 interviews for developers including requirements for a GitHub/Bitbucket repo, X years of programming experience etc and 400 of them haven't seen code in their lifetime. The fact that people are so assured that what they do is programming is making it close to impossible to find or grow talent to a certain set of skills (which is fairly well defined in other dev communities)

Confidence ain't the problem here; it is polluting the market with broken extensions, underpricing services that have been estimated by Lego builders first, and being unable to find an actual developer in the wide pool of people with no skills. The bigger picture is that bothers me, as stated in the bullet list with problems in the post.

It doesn't, unless you provide services that consist of installing WordPress and a premium theme and playing with available options, or switching to a new one if a color settings isn't available.

It's like calling yourself a doctor after watching Grey's Anatomy and House, while the majority of the people study for 10 years and do real work.

While that's correct, it's a global shift in the perception of building websites.

10 years ago when most CMS weren't that flexible and extensible the majority of the websites were built from scratch, or with custom frameworks; the repository of available libraries or extensions wasn't there and people had to build everything from the ground.

Nowadays there are plenty of tools and services for free, and business owners with no technical experience start to compare free, cheap and custom. Networks such as Wix or Squarespace make it possible to build something that makes sense for a client, and the alternative is way too expensive.

So we're comparing free with $4K or $20K which wasn't quite the case many years ago. The other market - large and scalable or enterprise products - has Java, .NET, Ruby and Python as the main tools and clients - naturally - have different expectations.

Thanks for the remark