This is not an apples to apples comparison. The writer is casting programmers as "commodity code producers", meaning the end goal of the code and the path to cr

This is not an apples to apples comparison. The writer is casting programmers as "commodity code producers", meaning the end goal of the code and the path to creation (e.g. what technologies to use, modules to create, etc) are already defined. That's trivially true. You could make this same argument for an artist if there were a market for people that could paint and draw things that others told them to paint using specific techniques. You could make the exact same argument for managers. If you created a perfect recipe for "motivating a team" and "evaluating a direct report's performance" and all these other nebulous ideas, and just paid for executing that recipe, you'd make management a "dead end job". If you create a recipe for someone, 99% of the work is done. The true value comes from the joining of the "what" and the "how" with the execution. Divorcing the two makes any job a commodity job because it assumes the goal and the path have already been determined. So comparing a "commodity code producer" with a full managerial position is not an equal comparison.