While this is absolutely true and I've read this before, I don't think you can make this an open and shut case. Here's my perspective as an old guy.
The first thing that comes to mind when I see this as a counterargument is that I've quite successfully built enormous amounts of completely functional digital products without ever mastering any of the details that I figured I would have to master when I started creating my first programs in the late 80s or early 90s.
When I first started, it was a lot about procedural thinking, like BASIC goto X, looping, if-then statements, and that kind of thing. That seemed like an abstraction compared to just assembly code, which, if you were into video games, was what real video game people were doing. At the time, we weren't that many layers away from the ones and zeros.
It's been a long march since then. What I do now is still sort of shockingly "easy" to me sometimes when I think about that context. I remember being in a band and spending a few weeks trying to build a website that sold CDs via credit card, and trying to unravel how cgi-bin worked using a 300 page book I had bought and all that. Today a problem like that is so trivial as to be a joke.
Reality hasn't gotten any less detailed. I just don't have to deal with it any more.
Of course, the standards have gone up. And that's likely what's gonna happen here. The standards are going to go way up. You used to be able to make a living just launching a website to sell something on the internet that people weren't selling on the internet yet. Around 1999 or so I remember friend of mine built a website to sell stereo stuff. He would just go down to the store in New York, buy it, and mail it to whoever bought it. Made a killing for a while. It was ridiculously easy if you knew how to do it. But most people didn't know how to do it.
Now you can make a living pretty "easily" selling a SaaS service that connects one business process to another, or integrates some workflow. What's going to happen to those companies now is left as an exercise for the reader.
I don't think there's any question that there will still be people building software, making judgment calls, and grappling with all the complexity and detail. But the standards are going to be unrecognizable.
The first thing that comes to mind when I see this as a counterargument is that I've quite successfully built enormous amounts of completely functional digital products without ever mastering any of the details that I figured I would have to master when I started creating my first programs in the late 80s or early 90s.
When I first started, it was a lot about procedural thinking, like BASIC goto X, looping, if-then statements, and that kind of thing. That seemed like an abstraction compared to just assembly code, which, if you were into video games, was what real video game people were doing. At the time, we weren't that many layers away from the ones and zeros.
It's been a long march since then. What I do now is still sort of shockingly "easy" to me sometimes when I think about that context. I remember being in a band and spending a few weeks trying to build a website that sold CDs via credit card, and trying to unravel how cgi-bin worked using a 300 page book I had bought and all that. Today a problem like that is so trivial as to be a joke.
Reality hasn't gotten any less detailed. I just don't have to deal with it any more.
Of course, the standards have gone up. And that's likely what's gonna happen here. The standards are going to go way up. You used to be able to make a living just launching a website to sell something on the internet that people weren't selling on the internet yet. Around 1999 or so I remember friend of mine built a website to sell stereo stuff. He would just go down to the store in New York, buy it, and mail it to whoever bought it. Made a killing for a while. It was ridiculously easy if you knew how to do it. But most people didn't know how to do it.
Now you can make a living pretty "easily" selling a SaaS service that connects one business process to another, or integrates some workflow. What's going to happen to those companies now is left as an exercise for the reader.
I don't think there's any question that there will still be people building software, making judgment calls, and grappling with all the complexity and detail. But the standards are going to be unrecognizable.