My favorite takeaway from this is that I'm an ANGELIC TROUBLEMAKER (because much/most code is demonstrably terrible but I do have a fair amount of experience in

My favorite takeaway from this is that I'm an ANGELIC TROUBLEMAKER (because much/most code is demonstrably terrible but I do have a fair amount of experience in greatly simplifying it), but other than that I find several points in the article to only be relevant in these times. I've been through several boom/bust cycles and right now we're living in a boom period where: * Programming demands a high hourly rate * There are many programmers on the market, tending towards making them interchangeable cogs * Income inequality is high, leading to a wide discrepancy between wealth and technical literacy After the coming web2.0/mobile bust in a few years, these will likely no longer be true. I think what will make a good programmer then is the ability to map use cases (design) to abstractions and then to business logic in as little code as possible (preferably none at all). We're going to go back to a time more like the 1980s, when nontechnical people were able to get Real Work done with spreadsheets and DBMSs like Microsoft Access. I looked at Airtable a bit and it has some interesting ideas but is no panacea. There are other interesting attempts in that space but almost everyone seems to be moving in the opposite direction towards large volumes of highly imperative, object oriented code which is prone to technical debt that requires a longterm support staff of technicians to maintain it. In other words maintaining is currently more lucrative than architecting, but that wasn't always true, and will likely not be true again in a few years.