A big part of the market is making CRUD apps. The skills to develop these kinds of apps can be reliably learned. But even still, it's not quite as rote a skill as being a cog on an assembly line. There's still a lot of variability, and lots of parts to master (front end, databases, etc), interpretation of requirements. It's hard to just hire an army of peons and expect them to participate in CRUD.
If the development is exploring out new territory, then the workers will never be a commodity. Making new things never done before. Facial recognition, OCR with high reliability for crumby hand writing, etc. For these workers to be a commodity, you will have to create an AI with human level creativity to do exploratory creation. That will likely not happen in our great great great grand children's lifetimes.
Elbert Hubbard
Aren’t you confusing builders and engineers?
The term "computer programmer" gets assigned to everyone who makes software. Some programmers invent little like a dry wall worker. All average people could become this kind of programmer.
Other programmers invent with skills out of reach of most common people.
These are not builders and nobody would ever call them builders.
Well one person would, I guess.
But while the baseline expectation is higher, so is the complexity of new problems. Being a developer is to constantly be learning and adapting, changing direction and always trying new things.
If you're a tech company, looking to grow by building new products or significantly expanding existing ones, then your developers are assets and you treasure them.
If you're looking to grow in other ways (e.g. by acquisition) then you can put all your products in maintenance mode, and your developers are a cost that you want to cut as much as possible.
Developers as a whole are not a commoditised resource, but certainly can be treated that way depending on the company and its business plan.
There is actually a large segment of the online marketplace where I would say "commoditized" is almost accurate especially when compared with some Silicon Valley rates. And this does in fact include a significant percentage of highly skilled programmers.
Of course, when you are in the commodity rate range, finding the highly skilled programmers is a challenge. But as I said, they do exist.
But there is a limit to how far that goes. You will see massive discounts when comparing some markets, but the less common knowledge still is at a premium rate.
One caveat is that there will often be a minor concession in terms of something like English language proficiency for example.
But I think that us programmers actually should try to take proactive steps to slow the race to the bottom in terms of compensation. Especially as remote becomes mainstream and markets open up to online and overseas programmers even more.
My own personal belief, which is really just pure speculation, is that ordinary types of programming will be automated by artificial general intelligence within one or two decades. So I personally think that the wage labor paradigm and other core aspects of our economic system will be completely obsoleted.
If you have developers that use ever-more-simplified-tools and languages, there are companies that make those tools, and cloud companies that make the infrastructure and build all the things that make life easier for other companies. They still need strong programmers.
There will always be the need for extremely good programmers. If you are an extremely good programmer then you should be able to earn outsized monetary rewards and find intellectually stimulating projects if you are able to move to the right location (SF, Boston) and interview well.
If you compare this to the average McDonald's worker who is just expected to fulfill the same generic duties for the same generic pay, you can see most devs don't fit this definition.
Hmm... given in the interviews I've been as a web developer... No.
If I could redo my whole thing again, I'd focus much more at making people laugh and like me. That might get some "you passed the coding challenge but you don't have enough experience" out of the way.
Want it quickier just add more resources.
Not if you want it doing on time, budget or to any degree of quality.
You get more bricks but a worse wall.
No, it didn't.
> Developers became resources to be pluged into existing projects sprints.
> Want it quickier just add more resources.
Except for the word “sprints” all of that long predates Agile. This common management attitude was the central target of The Mythical Man-Month, which was published 26 years before the Agile Manifesto.