I would argue that programmers, for the most part, care very deeply about visual design. Every time you choose where to place line breaks, text alignment, even the use of variable names and other language constructs involves you making a choice about how your code is visually laid out in the editor.

The problem is, I propose, one of deeper social conditioning. I have worked professionally as both a designer and programmer, but I have never found a workplace that take both abilities completely seriously. Designers do design work and programmers do programming work and that is just the way it is. I think this leaves a lot of developers feeling like design is a completely different career that is out of their reach.