If it were, the median e.g. business analyst should be getting paid significantly more than the median software engineer. That's not what the data shows, however.
>I can genuinely say in all of my programming projects, I spent more time understanding the problem than writing code.
This is almost trivially true for anyone who understands the problem via writing code, though.
The business analyst mostly just scratch the top half of the first part.
But I do encourage them to go vibe coding! It's providing a lot of entertainment. On off chance, they would become one of us and would be most welcomed.
My real point is claiming #3 is the easiest is just silly. It's obviously much easier to come up with good business ideas in the abstract than to bring them into being. The mixture works because software as a business is an O-ring problem. These 3 tasks are not cleanly separable, they're all part of a feedback loop together.
That's not respecting #2, which still fall squarely in engineering profession.
The design of the solution are necessarily technical, otherwise it's just throwing a bunch of concept and big words to sounds cool and leads to nowhere.
The outcome of this solution would then go back and influence #1 which is the behavior that customer see. If Steve Jobs couldn't fit all of his components into his iphone then it wouldn't have existed, and he might have to settle for something less, like an ipod.
Obviously this would all exist in a ring and that's why everyone is continuously employed and mostly not fired once the product gets released.
What if you replace "business analyst" with "software architect"?
Writing the code is the trivial part.