Well said, the only flaw is the unfortunate realization that "I understand things and then apply my ability to formulate solutions" is rarely required, how many zombie corps are still roaming these days?
Judging by how many day to day tech products in my life are buggy, slow or user-hostile there can't be more than 50-100 tech companies actually innovating, right?
I really don't like the lang itself but nobody will deny it has a very strong ecosystem and stdlib for handling around 95% of many well-solved problems you are likely to encounter.
To be fair to this example it was also an tough situation: imagine MS trying to release W10 Classic with W11 still in prod!
E.g. the older ver may well be better, and even what most users want, but pulling off the optics of selling both without damaging the modern variant is difficult if you're not c-level. The internal champion would basically be ending their career with "yeah I messed up the product let's roll back". Also sends a very interesting signal to shareholders and competitors about the direction of the corp.
It will be interesting as orgs flatten to see what will keep all the remaining "superhuman AI-powered all-in-one" employees from just making their own shop.
Good lord, thank you. I'm a huge fan of LLMs, they've replaced enormous amounts of toil for me but they are not 'my job'.
If you walk to the kitchen and fry up an egg are you now a master chef? What's the difference between a surgeon and a butcher ...they both cut things?
Most shops never really needed development expertise in-house as there's no shortage of many decent tools equally suitable as code for getting machines to do most business things.
In some ways this is worse because while it's functionally the same black box intermediary as the alternative-to-code tools there's an illusion of control and more sunk cost. Do you want your sales team selling or learning JavaScript churning out goofy knock-offs for a well-solved problem?
Aye, it never happens but it does sell a lot of books ;)
I don't think we'll reach this promised land™ until incentives re-align. Treating software as an assembly line was obviously The Wrong Thing judging by the results - problem is how can we ever move to a model that rewards quality perhaps similar to (book) authors and royalties?
Owner-operator SaaS is about as close as you can get but limits you to web and web-adjacent.
It's like reading books in order to get better at writing them... sure it kinda works but not really. You get better at SWE by building things!!
The field has a lot of gurus who trick newcomers into falacies like 'clean code' when, instead, they should be out there banging together rocks like a JavaScript caveman seeking fire (Lisps).