In his essay "Where Do You Get Your Ideas?," Neil Gaiman relates a common situation faced by authors:
Every published writer has had it - the people who come up to you and tell you that they've Got An Idea. And boy, is it a Doozy. It's such a Doozy that they want to Cut You In On It. The proposal is always the same - they'll tell you the Idea (the hard bit), you write it down and turn it into a novel (the easy bit), the two of you can split the money fifty-fifty.
Computer programmers often find themselves in similar situations. Some well-meaning person says they have a Great Idea for an application. They'll tell the programmer the idea, and then all the programmer has to do is write the code to implement it. The Idea Person will get the bulk of the credit, but the lucky programmer gets to ride those coattails. After all, coding must be easy: it's just a bunch of stuff somebody has to type. The idea, the design, the inspiration - that's the hard part, right?
Usually, no.
Don't get me wrong: a great idea is a great idea, and a talented application designer is certainly worth more than the average programmer. But most people just aren't that smart.
And even if the idea is amazing and the designer creates a brilliant user experience, the bulk of the work still falls on the programmers' shoulders. If you take all the man-hours spent designing the iPhone, and all the man-hours spent implementing the operating system, frameworks, and standard applications, and making it all work the way the designers intended, I'd bet the latter number would be at least ten times the former. Maybe twenty times.
Programming is just plain hard, in a way that related software-development activities are not. And it is unforgiving. If a programmer makes a mistake, the program crashes or gives incorrect results. In contrast, if the UI designer makes a mistake, the consequences are not so dire; it just means the application is not quite as good as it could be.
It's usually a programmer who has to fill in all the details of someone else's grand design. When it's 2:00 AM, and the architects are snuggled in their beds, and some program is crashing because nobody thought about how to handle a certain condition, it's a programmer who has to decide how to fix it. Programmers make dozens of these kinds of decisions every day, while the Big Picture guys talk about golf.
I don't intend to put programmers up on a pedestal. Developing good software also requires good designers, good artists, good technical writers, good testers, good managers, and a good user community. But, please, don't insult coders by treating them like a bunch of glorified typists. Programming requires as much imagination, inspiration, and perspiration as any other creative endeavour.