[riazrizvi]

It’s not just coders who are commoditized. I find every specialist gets commoditized in the mind of people who are not specialists in that specific field. “He’s a programmer, he’s a quant, he’s a surgeon, he’s an astronaut...”. It’s because we have biases where we believe our own path is a bit harder than everyone else’s. I think it’s natural because everyone has a clearer sense of their own struggles, but only a superficial sense of the struggles endured to acquire expertise they don’t have. Furthermore we have a bias that insufficiently accounts for expertise atrophy so we tend to think of our expertise as the accumulation of all our experience but if we applied the right discount function we’d see that expertise has to be deliberately practiced to be acculumulated to the level in our egos. Few experts do that. The net effect is that the world doesn’t value our own expertise as much as we are inclined to ourselves.