[kragen]

i agree with all of this except for the 'perfectly competent' part. a programmer who advocates hiring someone else because they're too busy doing routine work instead of automating it is not a 'perfectly competent developer'; they're what this article terms a 'technician'

(actual technicians, however, for example in electronics or chemistry labs, are generally not doing routine and predictable work; they spend a lot of their time debugging why things have failed, which is the opposite extreme, and they tend to automate as much of their work as they can. so i'm not convinced the choice of term is correct)

neither toolmakers nor surgeons in brooks's model were doing routine, predictable work. (but his model also hasn't been very successful, so possibly it wasn't a good model)

i like smaug's term 'toil'. so maybe we should say 'software engineers should not toil too much' instead of talking about what they should or shouldn't be