There are a couple of problems that I see with the entire premise behind this article.
1. Web development can be challenging. Writing a simple blog or wiki system in PHP might be "easy", but creating a wordpress.com or wikipedia.org is a whole different ballgame. Latency, scalability, architecture, high availability, manageability, security - the challenges are endless.
2. I don't understand why software developers tend to value the "difficulty" of the technology used in a product over the utility of the final product to end customers. Creating a web app in PHP for sharing daily tidbits in your friends' lives may not be as challenging as writing a compiler for a functional language like Haskell, but its end value may far eclipse that of the latter. Facebook and Twitter after all started as fairly simple applications but are multi-billion dollar companies now. I would even say that there is a certain unix-like elegance in using the easiest, simplest technologies to create the maximum returns in terms of utility to humans. And that, IMO, is far from being a "brain-dead" skill.
The article is about people who use things like wordpress and maybe write little plugins for them, rather than designing the frameworks in the first place. Those types of work are, undeniably, very different, one common analogy being the difference between car mechanics and automotive engineers. I don't see the author's work as brain-dead (neither is the work of car mechanics), and the author clearly implies he doesn't either. But he is surrounded by people that sneer at it -- that certainly seems believable to me.
1. Web development can be challenging. Writing a simple blog or wiki system in PHP might be "easy", but creating a wordpress.com or wikipedia.org is a whole different ballgame. Latency, scalability, architecture, high availability, manageability, security - the challenges are endless.
2. I don't understand why software developers tend to value the "difficulty" of the technology used in a product over the utility of the final product to end customers. Creating a web app in PHP for sharing daily tidbits in your friends' lives may not be as challenging as writing a compiler for a functional language like Haskell, but its end value may far eclipse that of the latter. Facebook and Twitter after all started as fairly simple applications but are multi-billion dollar companies now. I would even say that there is a certain unix-like elegance in using the easiest, simplest technologies to create the maximum returns in terms of utility to humans. And that, IMO, is far from being a "brain-dead" skill.