My job for the last 8 years has involved
Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading the work -> presenting the work to the stakeholder and leading the UAT -> getting it to production.
The coding part has been a commodity for enterprise developers for well over a decade. I knew a decade ago that I wasn’t going to be 50 years old reversing b trees on a whiteboard trying to prove my worth.
Doing the work is the only thing that the AI does.
While I don’t make the eye popping BigTech comp (been there. Done that and would rather get a daily anal probe than go back), I am making more than I could make if I were still selling myself as someone who “codez real gud” as an enterprise dev.
> Talking to sales to get an idea what the customer wanted from the business side (first B2B at a product company and now consulting) -> talking to the customer and hashing out more detailed requirements -> designing the architecture and a proposed technical plan -> presenting it to the stakeholder (sometime internal sometime external) -> doing the work or delegating and leading the work -> presenting the work to the stakeholder and leading the UAT -> getting it to production.
You are not the first person to say things like this.
Tell me, you ever wondered why a person with a programming background was filling that role?
Look, there are at least dozens of us who like and enjoy programming for programming's sake and got into this crazy industry because of that.
Many of these people made many of the countless things we take for granted every day (networking, operating systems, web search; hell, even the transformer architecture before they got productized!).
Seeing software development --- and software engineering by proxy --- get reduced to a jello that will be stepped on by "builders" in real-time is depressing as shit.
It's even more depressing to see folks on HACKER news boost the "programming never mattered" mentality that's taken hold these last few years.
Last comment I'll make before I step off my soapbox: the "codez real gud" folks that makes the big bucks bring way more to the table than their ability to code...but their ability to code is a big contributor to why they bring more to the table!