"We thought computing would be artisanal. We did not imagine great monopolies."
In a sense, it still is, and always will be. I feel that the core of programming, just making the computer do things other people want it to for money, will always lead us back to a highly individualized workflow, where a single programmer has complete mastery over the system. It's just that the programmer-artisan must find work in the context of these great, monopolistic organizations, which inevitably apply pressure to reduce the amount of skilled labor required to perform a given business function, and thereby increase the organization's leverage in salary negotiations, leading to hyper-specialized assembly line processes that eventually just stop working because no one has the broad systems-level knowledge required to trace a bug to its source anymore. It would be great if these monopolies could just accept the artisanal nature of software development and pay people what they're worth.