My first exposure to anything programming related was some web publishing courses I took at a community college when I was a teenager. The classes were intended for people with a graphic design, rather than developer bent, so the classes were mostly focused on HTML, CSS, and web design-relevant Photoshop tricks.

I credit those classes with sparking my interest in programming, but they didn't actually cover it to any extent. Instead there was this attitude that you could just find a Javascript file or Perl CGI script that would do what you need, and when necessary you could shoehorn it in, despite having little to no understanding of the involved programming languages. GitHub didn't exist yet, so there wasn't a centralized, trustworthy source of free Javascript modules; instead you had to find them on sketchy ad-riddled sites and hope they did what they said they did. I remember there were even sites that would sell scripts, a concept that feels totally alien to me now in 2016.

tl;dr Invented here syndrome is a big thing for web designers who aren't developers