I don’t disagree. But if you want to work as an artisan you don’t work at a factory. Similarly, you can’t expect the products coming out of a factory to be at the artisan level.
What is it about software that causes us to search for aesthetic qualities in the instructions we write for a machine? Ultimately the problems we’re solving, for most of us, will be utterly meaningless or obsolete in ten years at most.
I think a lot of software engineers have been in denial that we have been working in factories as a lot of the ZIRP-era technical structures were constructed in such a way to make it seem like we were part of guilds. The average company cares about craft only insomuch as it feeds enough product reliability and productivity.
That illusion has been lifted a little harshly for a lot of people over the past year or so. I still enjoy software-as-craft but I don't hold any false belief that my day job does.
What is it about software that causes us to search for aesthetic qualities in the instructions we write for a machine? Ultimately the problems we’re solving, for most of us, will be utterly meaningless or obsolete in ten years at most.