[pytrin]

The article is technically well written, but somewhat uninformed which stems from the author's limited experience and what he sees in popular media.

I thought the top comment below reflected what I have seen in my 10 years in the industry, much better:

" This is a very well written piece, but it's only covering the frothy tip of a very deep phenomenon. I too am a Rails developer, have been coding professionally for 15 some odd years, and I too find what VCs are chasing nowadays to be mostly time wasting crap. But that's not what software, even web software, is really about right now. It's just the glam side of the game.

The real folks making real things happen are building tools and technologies that literally could not have existed 10 years ago. In my personal experience, I've built integrated web portals that show real-time electricity usage for factories, saving them 10-50 grand a month by lowering usage during peak hours. I've built sales management tools that allowed a 2 man company to scale to a distributed team of dozens. Online rental advertising systems to cut out costly newspapers. Medical order management systems.

It's not glamorous, it doesn't get on TechCrunch or Hacker News, but it's real value, delivered by real professionals. And that, more than the stupid photo sharing cruft, is what's really driving developer salaries.

During the late 90's, the joke/threat was "go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script" - the point being that lots of human work could be automated by a savvy developer. That threat has become a promise, and we (costly) web developers are the ones fulfilling that promise across a huge range of industries." - Rob Morris

[freditup]

I remember reading this article when it first came out - it's biting and does a good job criticizing things that probably deserve some criticism.

But, I agree with that top comment - the real value from coders come from solving real problems people have. One non-profit near me said to me once: "We spend so much staff time entering data into our CRM software from the forms our clients fill out. We wish our staff could spend more time helping the clients."

And this is a great (and easy) problem for technology to solve. Solving problems like this is where technology is great, it simplifies life, it reduces unneeded work, etc. And often, it's actually, in my opinion, more fun than the 'glamorous stuff'.

[girvo]

> And often, it's actually, in my opinion, more fun than the 'glamorous stuff'.

Can't agree more with you. When I look for a job, I look to work at places solving difficult or complex problems that can create real value, and more often than not that's not at the next photo-sharing-social-site, although once those places get to scale cool tech does get created. I just love working in this industry full stop, and wouldn't trade it for the world!

[lelandbatey]

Wow that quote is totally spot on.

It's interesting, because I am experiencing this first hand. I just started an internship working inside a large DOE facility, PNNL. The team I'm working on just makes sites for other large projects, sites to allow scientists and researchers to communicate with each other, share data, manage content, etc. It's very much not sexy work. But it's work that keeps thousands of others productive. So that quote really hits close to home.

[dpweb]

Devs getting paid well is nothing new. If you look at enterprise apps, we're making good money, but not more (or much more) than 10-15 years ago. Salaries have been pretty stagnant just like the rest of the middle class. The 21 yr old with 6 month experience making 100k. That is a newer development I think. Bubble.