I get what this post is saying, and I feel it too, deep in my bones. But technical work, especially in software, is being commoditized. If you view commoditization as a process, the end point of it is "free" (as in beer).
I've been in tech long enough to remember when you had to carve literally every line of code out of the firmament of the heavens to get anything done. Today the bulk of technical work is plumbing together literally millions of lines of "free" (as in freedom and beer) code to get some behavior that checks all the requirements boxes.
Going from the post some more, modern developers are more akin to line cooks that put ingredients together. There's value to that skill, but it's a reduced value as its easier to learn to plug together APIs than to craft a cache aware data structure and reduce the big-O of some algorithm while fitting it into limited RAM.
In most restaurants line cooks are almost a commodity (even the sous and executive chefs are to a point), customers don't know if the cook from yesterday quit in a rage and a new guy got picked up this morning who had also quit in a rage from the place next door. Follow the recipe and you get the same product to the customer.
News for the tech folks here, line cooks (even experienced ones) make shockingly less than the average fell off a bus tech-bro with a couple bootcamps and a github repo.
The average developer is today thousands of times more productive than the developers from 30 years ago because they don't have to build the ingredients anymore -- the industry is well bootstrapped by now. But if some future Co-Pilot LLM can turn one developer into 4, and effectively "auto-plumb" with minimal human direction then...
I had a great chat with a reader yesterday, where I became very concerned that we aren't incentivizing young people (like myself!) to pick up the "carve code out of firmament" skills. We just rely on certain personality types getting into it, whereas we fling prestige and money at surgeons. Meanwhile, where I am, they'll only fling money at me if I memorize details about the Snowflake billing model and API - not very useful to society if we need to innovate!
You're right though. As someone near the top pointed out - some things actually do get commoditized, like mail merges. That actually works and is probably never going away. Maybe the real issue is that a lot of these products aren't innovative at all, have no shot at being the next mail merge, and our leaders largely don't understand how to tell the difference.
I've been in tech long enough to remember when you had to carve literally every line of code out of the firmament of the heavens to get anything done. Today the bulk of technical work is plumbing together literally millions of lines of "free" (as in freedom and beer) code to get some behavior that checks all the requirements boxes.
Going from the post some more, modern developers are more akin to line cooks that put ingredients together. There's value to that skill, but it's a reduced value as its easier to learn to plug together APIs than to craft a cache aware data structure and reduce the big-O of some algorithm while fitting it into limited RAM.
In most restaurants line cooks are almost a commodity (even the sous and executive chefs are to a point), customers don't know if the cook from yesterday quit in a rage and a new guy got picked up this morning who had also quit in a rage from the place next door. Follow the recipe and you get the same product to the customer.
News for the tech folks here, line cooks (even experienced ones) make shockingly less than the average fell off a bus tech-bro with a couple bootcamps and a github repo.
The average developer is today thousands of times more productive than the developers from 30 years ago because they don't have to build the ingredients anymore -- the industry is well bootstrapped by now. But if some future Co-Pilot LLM can turn one developer into 4, and effectively "auto-plumb" with minimal human direction then...