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Once upon a time, engineers were presented with some fundamentals in school in terms of what computing ought to be.  They taught good principles in school such as robustness, efficiency, security, correctness, etc.

Then along came a phenomenon called the web.

The ease of creating web pages led thousands of people to easily create sites, both professionally and personally.  However, these sites never could scale, so they added a database backend and dynamic scripting languages to power up these sites.  Still, due to the tremendous load that these sites experienced, more power was needed both in the form of hardware and optimizations in the way the language was implemented into a web server or the web server itself.

Then the web went "boom!" because all the money was drained once investors got impatient that the numbers seen weren't what they were expecting.

At that point, a great purging occurred of all the hacker types that infested IT companies.  People who read a book or two, copied a few scripts and played around at home with their PC yet never receiving any formal schooling were getting cut off from the industry as companies tightened their purses and sought only the "truly" qualified candidates.

Things sputtered around for a while as the industry as a whole sought to heal itself from the influx of wannabe programmers and businesses thinking that they could make instant billionaires out of a few bad ideas.

Then came along a little search engine/company called Google and the new era of web 2.0.

Armed with Google, the remaining developers and wannabes now could find anything.  Having an education in CS was pointless because the web pretty much destroyed any notion of what good programming practices were, instead dumbing down everyone into copying the flavor of the month without realizing how many times they were re-inventing the wheel.

Worse yet, everyone started copying how Google did things.  The whole plan was to copy Google's methods for success, hoping to get a piece of that web 2.0 pie.  Or now, that we're aware that we can "version up", people are now looking for the web 3.0 or 4.0 or whatever stupid marketing ploy is used to get VC money.

But when I look at this paradigm shift of what the computer industry has become and see where the computer sciences had been, I have to state that I think these two elements have really dumbed down programmer's natural intuition.  All we think about these days are just performance, getting it up, scripting language + DB backend + fancy looking front end = money, etc.  Worse yet, I hate it when people start copying practices from a company like Google.  I appreciate what Google has done, but truth be told, it only works for them.

Stop trying to emulate them.  Find your own niche.  That's how they became successful. 

And to the web programmers, I'm hoping that you go to school and really undestand your fundamentals.  And I hope companies appreciate the fundamentals of CS.  They're studied for a good reason.  There's no reason to ignore them.