That's 95% of the work? Suppose, we do really have two those things established, say copying an existing system or feature, do you honestly believe that there's not much else to do, because the people-in-charge did all the thinking and hard work, and all that is left is peasant programming work!? I'm sorry but that really reeks of self-justified corporate bullshit that OP was talking about.
I'm a software developer, a pretty good one, and I agree with them.
Writing code is, for the 95% to 99% case, easy. (That last 1% to 5% requires anywhere from cleverness to brilliance.) It's figuring out what needs to be written that is very difficult. It's the part that involves actually talking to people, understanding their needs, having empathy for those needs so as to help you refine a solution from "it'll work" to "it's good", and only then does hands-on-keyboard programming matter.
And most of it doesn't; it can be slapdash and it can be duct-tape-and-chewing-gum and as long as it correctly solves the problem at hand--which was identified and planned against long before a programmer ever thought about a line of code!--it's fine.
Programming is not easy. Programming is specialized labor. But it is the implementation of a strategy. Why would the implementation matter more than having the strategy in the first place? This is why well-paid programmers (outside of the inflated FAANG market, at least) are positively brilliant and working on high-value technical problems, decision-makers and leaders of people, or both.
I think you are conflating two unrelated things just by assigning the same percentages. Stating that coding is 95-99% easy doesn't necessarily means that it only accounts for 5% of the work. Yes, I perfectly understand the words you have emphasized. I do believe you are a pretty good developer, but please don't get the impression that people who questions the stated 95% work allocation is a asocial code monkey who is incapable of empathy.
> Why would the implementation matter more than having the strategy in the first place
Who said that? Noone is saying that programming is more important. On the other hand, I see I lot of people saying programming is trivial and not important. I wouldn't have objected if it was at least 25%. But 5%? That's probably true if you're just gluing frameworks together all day, but even then...
Is it not really absurd to claim that the person deciding things and telling people what to do is doing almost all of the work? But suppose that maybe there was a lot of nuance and research involved, and the resulting specification is very detailed. If that is the case, the programming involved will not be trivial either, hell it might be even harder.
> Writing code is, for the 95% to 99% case, easy
> Programming is not easy. Programming is specialized labor
D-did you just contradict your self there? I'm not sure what are you getting at anymore.
