Comment by moron4hire

The big, overlooked thing here seems to be that the vast majority of software developers are employed as consultants. Here on HN, you're used to thinking in terms of startups creating products, doing real R&D: creating a product that is speculating that someone will buy it over the next X years. But that's just not how most people who do "computer programming" are employed. Most of us are working to build some stupid CRUD app that would be basically turnkey if it weren't for the fact that consulting is so cut-throat that it can't keep any talented senior developers around. To call what consultoware developers do "R&D" would be like calling a subcontractor who does construction for suburban housing developments an "architecture firm". There's, like, some tangential relation, if you really squint hard, but in reality, there are none of the necessary creativity, or the risks creative work implies, at play.