If you want to get a job as a mechanical engineer and design car engines for a living, you don't necessarily need to know how to be an auto mechanic, however, if you spent a summer rebuilding a classic car engine, you might be surprised to learn a few things along the way that help you to design better engines when you do get a job.
I think this analogy works very well for simple web monkey tasks. Sure, building a simple LAMP application will not help your CS chops like writing your own toy programming language will, but you might learn something along the way about Apache, PHP/Python, Linux, or MySQL that will help you in your career. It also gives you a chance to question some of the fundamentals that have been with us for years - why do we use SQL for so many things? Maybe a key/value store would work better for certain apps.
Just like a mechanical engineer might be able to design an engine that is easier to work on if he rebuilt an engine in a garage once or twice, a software engineer might be able to write code that is more easily maintainable if he installed WordPress once or twice. Learning the difference between a good and a bad install procedure can at the very least help you write an installer that doesn't suck.
If you want to get a job as a mechanical engineer and design car engines for a living, you don't necessarily need to know how to be an auto mechanic, however, if you spent a summer rebuilding a classic car engine, you might be surprised to learn a few things along the way that help you to design better engines when you do get a job.
I think this analogy works very well for simple web monkey tasks. Sure, building a simple LAMP application will not help your CS chops like writing your own toy programming language will, but you might learn something along the way about Apache, PHP/Python, Linux, or MySQL that will help you in your career. It also gives you a chance to question some of the fundamentals that have been with us for years - why do we use SQL for so many things? Maybe a key/value store would work better for certain apps.
Just like a mechanical engineer might be able to design an engine that is easier to work on if he rebuilt an engine in a garage once or twice, a software engineer might be able to write code that is more easily maintainable if he installed WordPress once or twice. Learning the difference between a good and a bad install procedure can at the very least help you write an installer that doesn't suck.