Comment by athrowaway3z

If your comment does anything for me its to show how terribly few words we have to discuss these things.

> "meta-level" concepts

I'd say having a strong grasp of what you can achieve with just using files and folder, or understanding how SQL solves en entire problem space are meta level concepts. Its just that we take them for granted.

> business value

Is apparently something different than 'value', but still includes every software ever that was valuable to a business?

> high level details

...?

> software engineering

Building constraint solver for a compiler or ensuring a JS animation centers a div?

> highly theoretical and focus on abstractions, design principles

I'd recognize all these things. But out of context 'in the general case' they become meaningless.

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I understand the picture you are trying to paint, but i don't think it tells anything beyond "I've noticed people make things overly complex". I agree.

However, keep in mind the 'get things done and provides value' software you've seen: is the software 'that survived', might have been set up by a very experienced person ( whose failures we're not seeing ), nobody might recognize it as being not-simple ( e.g. I've seen high value business software partial recreate 'regex'. Worked great, straightforward and easy to read function, just ~50 lines or so, could have been a single function call. ), how the requirements are presented is hugely important.