“If the work you do is essentially a commodity, like writing computer code”
The only people who think writing code is a commodity are those who have never done it - or not done it well.
I was thinking about that as I wrote my statement. You’re exactly right, when it comes to how code SHOULD be written. Unfortunately, today an awful lot of programming is commoditized, which is why we get some really bloated, inefficient, buggy stuff from places like India. It’s bothered me for years that as processor speeds followed Moore’s law, it seems that programmers stopped trying to optimize code because they could just hack together bloated code and rely on the brute force of faster processors to make it run well enough to get by. That’s just wasting the leap in hardware speed.
There’s a vast difference between talented, creative, top-flight programmers and the drones working in code-writing farms, but unfortunately it seems most companies prefer the cheapness of the latter.