I had a great chat with a reader yesterday, where I became very concerned that we aren't incentivizing young people (like myself!) to pick up the "carve code ou

I had a great chat with a reader yesterday, where I became very concerned that we aren't incentivizing young people (like myself!) to pick up the "carve code out of firmament" skills. We just rely on certain personality types getting into it, whereas we fling prestige and money at surgeons. Meanwhile, where I am, they'll only fling money at me if I memorize details about the Snowflake billing model and API - not very useful to society if we need to innovate! You're right though. As someone near the top pointed out - some things actually do get commoditized, like mail merges. That actually works and is probably never going away. Maybe the real issue is that a lot of these products aren't innovative at all, have no shot at being the next mail merge, and our leaders largely don't understand how to tell the difference.