But then again most IT jobs are the equivalent of flipping burgers at mcdonald's, nobody's asking them to be Michelin starred chefs.
First, the pervasive assumption that there is no skill involved in food preparation is wrong. While the floor may be higher in a kitchen operated by an executive chef, there is a noticeable difference between a badly-made Big Mac and a well-made one. Execution matters.
Next, at this point "IT" is so broad as to be almost meaningless. In this discussion, we're talking about programming.
Finally, you're holding up Michelin starred chefs as being inherently better than all other chefs. The Michelin star program is skewed towards one particular end result; to put it in technology terms, it's like grading your business solely on a narrow set of SLOs rather than a holistic understanding.
AI is liberating them because it automatise 80% of their work, and there is nothing wrong about that. Most people work on projects that won't even exist in 10 years, let's stop pretending we're all working on Apollo tier software... Coding isn't a craft, it's not an art, it's a job in which you spend the vast majority of your time fucking up your eyes and spine to piss code for companies treating you like cattle.
For every """code artisan""" you have a thousand people who'd be as excited about working in a car factory or flipping burgers, it just so happens that tech working conditions are better
However, if people are writing software that other people rely on, there has to be some expectation of quality. Software that controls a machine responsible for keeping someone alive, for instance, should function reliably.
Relying on AI to vibe-code such software is dangerous at best.
I worked fast food in high school in the 00s, like many folks here, I bet.
The line and product at a fast-food restaurant is heavily optimized. The patties used by a typical US quick-serve restaurant are designed around processes for optimal cook times per patty.
It really doesn't require much skill to assemble a burger at McDonald's these days outside of minimal training most unskilled people can pick up easily.
I was comparing burger flippers to michelin chefs, not to devs. The vast majority of devs are gluing tools together and working on basic CRUD stuff, which is the burger flipping of the tech world. It's just a job, people don't want to think about code in the shower, on walks, or "cry" about tech problems as the author seems to romanticise. A job is here to provide money so you can live life, not the other way around. If I can automate my burger flipping to go to the gym or read a book instead I'll gladly do it
I do some of the, ahem, "romanticised" things you mentioned because even in CRUD stuff there are hard problems to solve - particularly problems introduced by other people.
We work to get paid, but you can't get around the fact that we spend so much of our lives at work that it is a part of life.