[meheleventyone]

It's sort of true but a very one-dimensional view on an individuals contributions which is a bit worrying coming from a people manager. I think its funny people go around lionizing individual technical skill and at the same time insist that people are interchangeable.

In my experience most programming jobs don't really require deep domain expertise or share it by osmosis. Ideally a smart, dedicated person that gets a 40 hour a week crash course from experts in the field should get up to speed reasonably quickly.

In the absence of experts there exists a whole slew of technology that democratizes hard fields like game creation and machine learning. You can commit all sorts of sins and still end up with a well functioning product. Partly resting on technology developed as an enabler and partly resting on the sheer amount of available compute.

IMO people are far more easily replaced in terms of making an individual code contribution than they are as members of a team and it's the latter that is significantly more important. Good teams are multipliers for their members. Replacing a team member in a well functioning team is a super risky prospect. Yet we live in a world of frequent re-orgs, teams smooshed together haphazardly and overvaluing individual technical skill.

I don't see that changing anytime soon as it all sort of works and there is an endemic lack of interest.