> "My personal hypothesis is that we’re increasingly being treated like assembly line workers."
Developers don't like hearing this but the vast majority of us _are_ effectively assembly line workers. We do little to no actual engineering, instead we plumb together pre-packaged framework, libraries, and software. We are treated as fungible because that sort of worker is intrinsically fungible; skill is involved in software development but not enough to elevate it from being a trade to being a profession. A symptom of this is the not infrequent HN posts complaining that "Nobody actually uses CS education in the real world"; assembly line workers don't need a degree to do their job either.
By this logic, who isn’t an “assembly line worker”? I’ve had a few careers, hobbies and view into various different fields due to extended family. I’ve been an architect, an artist (pencil drawings mostly), and pursued medicine for a while. Software development uses more brain power than all of them combined (in my experience). Is everything other than phds “assembly line work” in your estimation?
Somebody has to design the things the assembly line worker is assembling. Building the frameworks and libraries that I mentioned earlier, not to mention the database engine, cloud services platforms, language compilers/interpreters, the operating systems, and so forth all do require very deep engineering expertise, though not necessarily a Ph.D.
Developers don't like hearing this but the vast majority of us _are_ effectively assembly line workers. We do little to no actual engineering, instead we plumb together pre-packaged framework, libraries, and software. We are treated as fungible because that sort of worker is intrinsically fungible; skill is involved in software development but not enough to elevate it from being a trade to being a profession. A symptom of this is the not infrequent HN posts complaining that "Nobody actually uses CS education in the real world"; assembly line workers don't need a degree to do their job either.