The world didn’t need as many programmers as we were led to believe. Showing text, images, and video is a solved problem. There doesn’t need to be a new framework every 6 months. They don’t need to throw out the last one to churn out a rehash of the same website so coders can justify their existence with some metrics of performance designed impress people who barely understand what they’re seeing, but nod their head in approval so nobody realizes they’re bluffing to hide their tech illiteracy. Everybody in the room is doing the same thing. The nerd with slide decks is grinning ear to ear at the approval. Maybe he starts to believe in the mythology that he might be a unicorn himself. It’s exercise in collective delusion. It needs to work because everybody involved is getting crazy rich. So the delusion must go on.

You don’t have your plumber come in every year and redo to all the pipes. Each time adding another superfluous section that serves naught but to make work for him. You sure don’t let him install a coin operated meter so he gets a cut of your water bill every time you need to flush, and then praise him like he’s the second coming of Jesus. He might be Jesus the plumber, but he’s no messiah. Maybe next years rework you’ll have him install a credit card swipe on your bathroom door.

Nobody is building entire trillion dollar multinational corporations around plumbing. Nobody is holding quarterly plumbers development conferences to announce the latest in pipework technology. In which the whole world streams it and watches in awe as they reveal the all new pipe join. Now for $999 a piece. You can’t call your plumber fast enough. Technology is cool but people can’t separate the science and engineering from the the trade work. They think the people making increasingly more cumbersome Rube Goldberg machines of code are the ones doing the science and engineering. Quite frankly I’m certain too many programmers think that too.