Like if I wanted to add EV charging to my home, I'd hope the electrician would take the time to explain the different levels of charging, the breaker and wire upgrades needled, etc., find a suitable installation site around the house, etc., not just start hooking things up willy-nilly. Or that a HVAC person might talk about the pros and cons of heat pumps, or a doctor might discuss different treatment options, etc.

It's different from, say, being a line worker in a factory assembling the same part 10000x a day, or a fast food worker.

Sure, at some level we're all just "solving problems", but I'm arguing that a good dev thinks about the problem and possible solutions as a whole, and utilizes that agency to make the final output better, instead of just coding Jira tickets to spec and never saying a peep.

But that's my own bias as a predominantly frontend person working for small or medium sized companies where specialization isn't as extreme. Maybe at bigger companies and teams they already have many layers of UX/UI/design/management and don't need (or want or appreciate) a dev speaking up about any of those things. In my experience it's never that black-and-white and a lot of tickets and designs are ambiguous and require both professional judgment and some empathy to implement well.

Maybe that's why I prefer the generalities and of the frontend vs, say, hyper-optimizing a very specific database call.