> Whatever happened to specialized engineers - aka, craftsman - which you (as the stakeholder) hold on to for dear life, and pay _any_ price to keep? I'm not e

> Whatever happened to specialized engineers - aka, craftsman - which you (as the stakeholder) hold on to for dear life, and pay _any_ price to keep? I'm not entirely certain about this, but I would say that management decided they didn't want to be "held hostage" by such craftsmen. Why pay ten times the price for a single developer, and be locked in to their presence and whims, while you can pay three times the price for three developers, and be able to manipulate them as desired? Of course, I'm not saying that's the ideal approach. It has rendered software a buggy and disposable commodity, one that both the creator and the user expect to be of limited life, aesthetic quality, and use. In software engineering, "survival of the fittest" rarely means what we would like it to mean, some beautifully crafted digital artifact that attains both immanence and permanence by the sheer force of pure virtue or something. It rather means "move fast and break things" on the back of a full stack of breakable and non-breakable things: from UX to, well, democracy, and including the well-being of the plug and play devs. Therefore Java is better than Lisp in this regard, design patterns are preferred over macros and DSLs, and a replaceable pool of fresh-out-of-school programmer are favored over an irreplaceable tenured craftsman. I (and you, and everyone of a similar bent) can certainly try and do "my bit", pour soul and art and craft into it to the limit of my abilities, and push these abilities to their next limits, by my deadlines are still going to be set by factors that don't consider craftsmanship a top driver, and I'll have to scrum alongside the other cogs to deliver and get paid on what is usually an internal proof of concept alpha christened a release on the basis of an arbitrarily chosen date. Occasionally, however, I get to brush up against the ideal for a few fleeting moments; either in code, or in thought and conversation. A glimpse of the sublime through the keyhole. But then it's time for a meeting, and a bunch of new tickets are -- ding-ding -- in my inbox. And, wouldn't you know it, that button now needs to be pink. Top priority, grab some coffee and get cracking, we need it yesterday.