Perhaps I&#x27;m assuming a casual familiarity with some of pg&#x27;s earlier essays than no longer exists. Although I think the reason I&#x27;m getting downvoted isn&#x27;t for being unclear, but rather for shitting on people&#x27;s self-identities.<p>As for being ahead of my time, if you look at the job market today it&#x27;s true that you do have a lot of people paid purely for their ability to code. These are mostly W2 employees, who work at the kind of places where you start out as a junior developer making 60 - 80k, and then make double that after 8-10 years. And given the current state of society, this is actually a pretty good career path.<p>However, we also have consultants who bill on a project basis based on value rather than skill, who might easily make 400k a year even as junior developers. (E.g. c.f. patio11&#x27;s essays.) And we have entrepreneurs and founding team members who get paid largely in stock, the worth of which is largely determined by how much the market values the product.<p>It&#x27;s kind of weird because as an industry we definitely need people who have ridiculously good technical skills, to the exclusion of all else. But for the most part programming is a pink-collar job that just happens to be done mostly by men. (In that it requires education, but there is a lot of downward pressure on salaries because the people involved are perceived as being largely interchangeable.) This is why I&#x27;ll sometimes describe myself as a software developer, but never as a programmer or a software engineer. Because although I know how to code and I might even spend most of the day coding, I don&#x27;t ever want to work at a job where I&#x27;m paid based on my coding ability.