> Tired of these absolutes.

Now, that is a letter to new developer that I wish I had read when I was a new developer:

Dear new developer,

Be careful when reading blogs. A lot of stuff you'll read online is insightful, informative, innovative, or inspiring. By all means, enrich your life with what you read, but be sure to also re-read "Wind in the Willows" from time to time and reflect on the character of Mr. Toad.

Regards,

Someone Who Made The Mistake of Putting Certain Bloggers on a Pedestal

Software is about all the things

You should have stopped at 90 degrees ;)

Without salespeople you can't sell software. Without developers, you can't make software. Since we all have to pay bills, selling software is of crucial importance, but that doesn't make the developers less important. It just means that the society we live in makes those who sell as important as those who make. Just like we strive to evolve software development, we should also strive to evolve the society.

I've made software that people happily used without anyone selling it to them or me earning a single cent off of it. At my age, if I had the luxury of not having to worry about money, that's the kind of thing I would be doing all the time.

Two things can be true simultaneously. Neither function works without the other.

And without the farmers pulling the potatoes out of the ground, we would all starve and die. So who is necessary, really?

Anywhere we can read some of your story? I'm always curious about devs that went into sales, or sales from a dev perspective

Raising the is–ought fallacy here i s a category mistake that weakens the author’s argument.

“Software is about people” argues:

> I used to think software was fundamentally about code. Experience taught me that I was mistaken. Software is fundamentally an artifact made by people, for people’s purposes, and its success depends on them.

“Software ought to be about people” says:

> Software isn’t necessarily about people, but I believe it should be.

You may argue the latter, but I think the OP believes software is already shaped by humans .

> just like people have autonomy over their bodies, they deserve autonomy over their software, without having to rely on a corrupt and incompetent industry

The technical means you mention won't give you that. The same people that make the industry "corrupt and incompetent" are leveraging those technical means to make it even more corrupt and less competent. Meanwhile, the rest of us who work in that industry are rapidly losing power to push back.

You can't rely solely on technology to solve problems rooted in human nature. I mean, we have better technology than at any point in human history, and somehow we're regressing on the issue of bodily autonomy.

This is why I'm so frustrated with people who are fanatical about AI adoption. It's not a panacea, it won't usher in some shiny utopia, it's just another technology that can be used both to improve lives and to oppress. If you take a careful look at our society, you can see which of those two uses is currently dominant.

What about charging people for electronic books? From an IP perspective, code is just a really bad book.

The compiler doesn't care whether your code is elegant. Your coworkers do. That's literally why code quality exists.

they are not saying code is worthless. they are saying that code which serves nobody is worthless. if you think that website sucks, it probably means that whoever is behind it don't know (or care) that a user like you exist, which is a pity.

For now. Will that remain true?

Every product is about investors.

More accurate to say restaurants are about people, not food. May be an apt analogy - chefs and cooks spend their time in the kitchen preparing food for a diner they don’t see.

> software jobs still hire based on how good your coding is primarily

ehhh. In my experience, being able to code is a necessary but not sufficient skill for a software developer. The only exceptions I've seen is having some extremely deep expertise in a niche technical field (and even then I wouldn't call that being able to code well, so much as technical domain knowledge).

When I was hiring at AWS the view for my team (RDS) was that there wasn't much difference in expectations between algorithmic coding ability for juniors and seniors. The primary technical differentiator for seniors was architectural and operational. But even more important than those was the nontechnical stuff; mentorship, being able to communicate ideas clearly and succinctly (no point in being able to architect a system if you can't communicate it in a way people understand), interacting with other teams, demonstrating understanding customer and business value, etc.

Don't they now hire based on AI token use?