[kortilla]

If someone wants a website that lists their company hours and has a contact form, that’s pretty much a known amount of hours for an experienced web dev. That’s about the equivalent of asking a carpenter to put in a door.

If someone wants a custom built order and inventory management system, that’s like asking a carpenter to build a custom 4 story house from some napkin sketches.

The whole reason computers are valuable is because they automate away all of the rote, repeated, predictable stuff. The unpredictable part of SWE is not comparable to carpentry, it’s more easily compared to architecture/engineering where the problem statements are vague and most of the job is getting agreements on what the thing will actually be. The carpentry part of programming is mostly predictable.

[TeMPOraL]

Agreed. Or in case someone brings up the good ol' "civil engineering" analogy - programming isn't like constructing a bridge. Constructing a bridge is what compilers do. Programming is the design and engineering that results in a blueprint. And our occupation is unique in that the construction part is so cheap, we can design iteratively, instead of actually thinking about what we're doing.