Only by going through real-world development with clients and attempting— successfully or not—to launch internal projects (often with punishing deadlines) do we hone our skills, learn our lessons, and, importantly, become strong enough and flexible enough to apply those lessons “the next time.” That’s striving for excellence, also known as professionalism.
Although learning specific skills and techniques and standards is critical to our becoming better developers, there are key areas that can be imparted only by working on actual Web development projects: communication, adaptation, and
persistence.
Communication
The Internet is about communication. The list of technologies that facilitate human contact goes on and on: instant messaging, email, VoIP when the telephone gets dated. Those meetings your colleagues describe as too long and pointless could instead be about finding consensus, focused on agreeing on the best solutions, if everyone has already discussed the problems before they reached the meeting room.