The most important thing, though, is whether or not someone can do their job. Because nowadays there are many types of developers/programmers and it would be a bit conceited to assign superiority to one class. Why is a web developer who only works with APIs and writing glue code somehow less than a guy who does assembly for a living? If this was the case, why would that web developer be paid $90+k in the Silicon Valley and the assembly programmer be worthless? If you were hiring a frontend developer for a 9-figure high profile startup soon to go IPO and make everybody millions (I dunno, maybe a Zynga or Playdom?) would you care more that the guy knows his algorithms, or that he is aware of cross browser compatibility issues? Again, the important thing is that the person can do the job.