In response to Houser's How Much Is Too Much blog post.

To quickly answer your question: as far as programming is concerned, there is never too much.

I have had many experiences as you have. In some job interviews I was told I was under qualified because I did not have a programming background. This particular job was a “will train right person” job in FoxPro. I promptly asked if he had taken a look at the provided code snippet I provided with my resume. PHP and JavaScript apparently are not considered programming. No matter how complex or how well documented the code was, it still was not considered programming. That particular code snippet was a PHP script that retrieved data from a MySQL database and used that data to output JavaScript. But it was not programming?

Another big hit us web heads take is that we are in fact web heads. There is this general outlook on webbies that all we know is HTML, and that we have become uppity and think we can program because of it. No matter what we show to rebut their belief, it never helps. Their opinion is well found at least. Thanks to FrontPage and Dreamweaver, anyone off the street can put together a web page through drag-n-drop. It is wonderful that these tools are present, but they give us developers a bad wrap. I try to make the distinction that I am a web developer – someone that does work with HTML, but also works with PHP, ASP.NET, C#, SQL databases, JavaScript, CSS, etc.

Unfortunately, the majority of hirers have this mentality that programming isn't programming. So that means that we must know as much as we can in order to get a job in development.