So developers are definitely not dead but will be empowered by the new tools and maybe their work will shift from solving problems+writing code to only solving problems.
So developers are definitely not dead but will be empowered by the new tools and maybe their work will shift from solving problems+writing code to only solving problems.
Usually a client or employer does not want write original software. I can code in C++/Rust/$LANGUAGE and am able to write you a high performance backend for some very specific, custom use case, but in 99% of the cases that isn't necessary because the underlying business is either 1) too generic or small to need something like this or 2) doesn't want the hassle of having to maintain something in-house.
Most companies that hire typical web/full stack devs value speed over anything else for the nth crud app they churn out. But I also don't see the value in these companies either.
Where employers in the past really cared is in the speed of delivery. Typically speed of delivery was faster using a framework solution only if the exact solution were already written and available as an extension. In absolutely every other case software originally written in house was always faster to deliver back to the business. This is because with original software the developers are not limited by prior existing conventions. It always comes down to the prior experience and confidence of a given set of developers.
The business knows this before assigning the tasks to the development team, and that awareness (more than anything else) determines the opportunities for developers to identify their own speed of delivery. Most development teams are entirely unaware of just how thoroughly their performance is measured from a business perspective. That should be painfully obvious, because developers only cost money, and those costs go straight to the bottom line.
Does this mean they just copy paste solutions? Otherwise I’m not sure how they’re writing anything but (albeit it might be very similar to code written at some other point in time, but do that often enough and you turn into an AWS service).
It sounds like this originality should be slow and of great challenge. It isn’t. With practice the words just appear in the correct order as fast as they are typed.
In the overwhelming majority of full stack jobs that level of originality does not exist. Most of these jobs, and the developers filling them, are utterly reliant upon large tool sets of prior formulated architectures. These large frameworks rob the developers of the practice necessary to become faster in their solution delivery and cripple their ability to consider answers of their own design.
As an example consider state management. That is an astonishingly simple problem to solve, essentially saving a result of modification for later artifact generation. With these large frameworks, however, the solution becomes a complex science to compensate for modularity considerations introduced by the frameworks that do not otherwise exist. For developers that have never written an original application without one of these large frameworks the simplicity of the solution is almost impossible to fathom, thus resulting in solutions of complexity outside their control and no ability for consideration of alternatives.