<i>Someone who works primarily on small javascript web applications has a really different job from someone who works on a large application built on a LAMP stack, or someone who writes complex iOS applications, or someone designs self-driving car software for Google, or someone who works on embedded software for pacemakers, or someone who writes operating systems or designs programming languages.</i><p>Do they?<p>If your job is primarily about taking other people&#x27;s work and writing code based on it then, in my opinion, you don&#x27;t really build software. You write code. There&#x27;s nothing whatsoever wrong with that, but it&#x27;s definitely different. Building software is much more than writing code.<p>Software development is working out what a problem is, what the solution to the problem is, and how to implement that solution on a computer. There should be time spent talking to users, gathering requirements, writing specifications, designing a user experience, developing a test strategy, <i>thinking about stuff</i>, writing documentation, and, at the end, a bit of coding. The non-coding side of software development isn&#x27;t especially different between specialisms. So, really, software development in the sense of everything necessary to make a piece of software does require approximately the same set of skills.<p>That said though, the <i>knowledge</i> required in any given part of the software industry is <i>very</i> different. A web developer needs to know very different things to someone doing graphics or embedded development.