I don't doubt people like the author's acquaintance exist, but I think that putting them up as "the norm" is really just setting up a straw man, and so many of

I don't doubt people like the author's acquaintance exist, but I think that putting them up as "the norm" is really just setting up a straw man, and so many of the "assumptions" in this article feel like straw men. To be clear, I don't doubt some people hold those assumptions, but given all the obvious evidence to the contrary, those people can be safely ignored as having no idea what they're talking about. For example, the largest, most profitable companies in the US are all tech companies, where software is either the primary product or an integral part of the product: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla. So if you're someone who thinks "software engineers are interchangeable cogs" or "in a business, software is just the icing on the cake", then sorry, you're an idiot, because you're oblivious to the fact that the top companies won largely by having the best software. And these companies also legendarily pay mightily for the best talent - why would they do that if "writing software is easy" or "software engineers are interchangeable cogs"? It just irks me when people take idiotic statements and then hold them up as "assumptions" in need of myth-busting. It's like when journalists find a couple outlandish Twitter comments by a few rando mouth-breathers so they can put together an article with a "Look what people are saying online!!!" headline.