I feel like the article is mostly written from a product perspective. I worked in an area that was billed out by the hour, it was just complicated enough to req

I feel like the article is mostly written from a product perspective. I worked in an area that was billed out by the hour, it was just complicated enough to require developers to do the work, but the work pieces were very quantifiable (add text to say xyz based on a business rule, show different images based on a rule, etc). It meant graduate programmers, immigrants with limited English skills, or others without much talent or drive would end up there. It's a good safe role for someone who just wants to get paid and go home on time (usually). It was very much a factory in the way the article says, but I feel like it has to be because of the nature of the work. I did talk to customers directly on larger projects but since I was building on top of internal systems and processes my role was mainly implementation/glue coding. Most of my frustrations were with our internal dev and IT who built and maintained the systems - over time they became more walled off, not less, which definitely impacted our work. And unfortunately as we were more 'client facing' any outages came back to bite us, not them, which was an annoying organisational dysfunction. They simply weren't incentivised to care as much as we were.