> Value Migration: Writing code becomes like typing—a basic skill, not a career. Value moves to understanding what to build, how systems fit together, and navigating the complexity of infinite cheap software pieces.

I saw this happening way before LLMs came on the scene in 2015. Back then, I was an ordinary journeyman enterprise developer who had spent the last 7 years both surviving the shit show of the 2008 recession and getting to the other side of being an “expert beginner” after staying at my second job out of college for 9 years until 2008.

I saw that as an enterprise dev in a second tier tech city, no matter what I learned well - mobile, web, “full stack development”, or even “cloud”, they were all commodities that anyone could learn “well enough@ so I wouldn’t command a premium and I was going to plateau at around $150-$160K and it was going to be hard to stand out.

I did start focusing on just what the author said and took a chance on leaving a full time salaried job the next year for a contract to perm opportunities that would give me the chance to lead a major initiative by a then new director of a company [1].

I didn’t learn until 5 years later at BigTech about promotions were about “scope”, “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

I had never had a job before with real documented leveling guidelines.

Long story short, left there and led the architecture of B2B startup and then a job working (full time) in the cloud consulting department of AWS fell into my lap.

After leaving AWS in 2023, I found out how prescient I was, the regular old enterprise dev jobs I was being offered even as a “senior” or “architect” were still topping out at around $160K-$175K and hadn’t kept up with inflation. I have friends who are making around that much with 20 years of experience in Atlanta.

Luckily, I was able to quickly get a job as a staff consultant at a third party consulting company. But I did have to spend 5 years honing my soft skills to get here. I still do some coding. But that’s not my value proposition.

[1] Thanks to having a wife in the school system part time with good benefits I could go from full time to contract to permanent in 2016.