Comment by sanderjd
6 days ago
I'm aware of that analogy, and thought that might be what you were alluding to, but I don't think it's a good analogy.
I agree with you that most professional software developers don't like being entrepreneurs, but I think that has more to do with disliking the parts of entrepreneurship that don't fit into "person who makes software", like fundraising and marketing.
But I think many - maybe most, but not all - professional software engineers actually do enjoy "making software", generally, and not just "coding", narrowly.
I agree that they enjoy "making software", but typically not if it involves a lot of instructing LLMs with natural language and reviewing their output. Again, this will become very similar to the job of a project or product manager who doesn't do any coding themselves. Developers tend to not like that kind of role.
Maybe! But I think this is very debatable, or at least, impermanent.
To me, it is very reminiscent of when I was a wee lad and there was a prevalent view that no real developer would want to make web applications, that was for script kiddies. But it turned out to be a useful kind of software to build, so a lot of people who build software started building web applications.
I also think that lots of developers do naturally enjoy increasingly higher levels of work than "just" writing code, as they progress in their careers. The job of "staff+ engineers" has significant overlap with what product managers do, where the "product" they're thinking about is the technical design of a larger system. Lots of developers really do enjoy this kind of work!