[jauntywundrkind]

> The objective metric for value is varying degrees of “was my problem solved”.

Everything said rests upon this. And this is an incredibly present view of programming.

And it's just so hogwash, to me. There's infinite paths we can take in programming to make something happen. Winnowing our view to only consider whether technically we have checked the box or not, blinding ourselves to how we win, disregarding countless other tangible and intangibles: it's an oppressive curse against the craft.

Craftsmen are capable of grappling with the intangibles; they use taste to pick paths that have internal elegance, legibility. They spawn architectures that perform well, atop a selection of apt tools and libraries from a wealth of known options, and which can be worked and reworked on as needed.

You can ignore every cofactor of production at your own risk, but the intangibles of how we win often matter, are an ever expanding horizontal and vertical depth of systems which will create path dependencies for all work going forward. People who focus only on immediate does it work outcomes rob us of vision and dream and short the real journey, which isn't ticket by ticket, but is something whole and bigger, is many components which to work well together require your skill at thinking and imagining comprehensively.