[lolinder]

This hasn't been my experience—the truly talented developers that I've worked with do more of the foundation tasks than the "salt" developers do. They're the ones who upgrade libraries when it's time, fix Jenkins when something goes wrong, and respond to a page and solve it, on top of the rest of their work. Meanwhile they're also automating the repetitive tasks in order to free up their own time and make it possible for them to move on to other things.

Automation is so easy in software development that your analogy to construction becomes pretty weak—we don't need someone moving around ladders because when we realize that's a need we just write a script for it.

[forgetfreeman]

I see y'all over there pretending lifers in your average IT department don't routinely make a career bunker out of legacy support among other odious pursuits despite the author explicitly pointing it out. In any case, if the department manager isn't tasking folks at their level of competence to extract maximum utility that's a failure on their part.