This is an interesting reflection, and I'm glad to have read it.

A few things came to mind:

The view of programming as "summarizing what's on StackOverflow" is really alien
to me. I suspect this is indicative of a particular approach to programming, and
perhaps to working in general, which I don't share. The author's view seems to
be that knowledge exists "out there" and the role of the "knowledge worker" is
to accumulate, internalize, and reshape it into products derived by
summarization. Compare this with another view on "knowledge work" taken from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_worker

> Nonaka described knowledge as the fuel for innovation, but was concerned that
> many managers failed to understand how knowledge could be leveraged. Companies
> are more like living organisms than machines, he argued, and most viewed
> knowledge as a static input to the corporate machine. Nonaka advocated a view
> of knowledge as renewable and changing, and that knowledge workers were the
> agents for that change. Knowledge-creating companies, he believed, should be
> focused primarily on the task of innovation.

High value knowledge work involves creating and transforming knowledge, not just
compressing or reconfiguring it.

To expand on this in abstract terms: knowledge work is fundamentally cognitive
and it gets its higher order purpose and potential from the application of
reason; i.e., it is concerned with rational cognition. Rational cognition is
mainly about synthesizing new, higher order concepts that direct and evolve
given concepts into more general and potent structures. This work involves
re-cognition as a necessary component, but if it were only recognitive -- as
it would be if were only concerned with recollection and summarization -- it
would not have the creative dynamic which it does.

To expand in more specific terms: programming work involves problem solving, but
it is not mainly about reassembling existing solutions to solve known problems.
The most valuable aspects of this work come from problem discovery, root
cause analysis, and solution invention. (Programming work that consists in
StackOverflow copy pasta is probably best viewed as the production of tech debt
:) This is not to say resources like StackOverflow arent useful, they definitely
are!)

I suspect it says more about the author's career aspirations and the reigning
interests of the political-economic system that they envision a future where
everyone is a manager. First, only if you have "manager brain" can you look at
what's happening in tech and see a future where everyone is a manager as a
positive development, when compared with a future where everyone is a
researcher, artists, arisen, inventor, etc. Second, the managerialization of
work is actually describing an idealized view of the present situation, and if
it is looming in the future it is only as an intensification of the current
dynamics. The rise of [the Professional Managerial Class was heralded in the
70s][1], and most tech workers are in the PMC:

> Who are these Americans working in the upper echelons of the knowledge
> economy, exactly? ... the Professional Managerial Class. The PMC, as they are
> now often called, came into existence in the late nineteenth and early
> twentieth centuries. They were not the old petty bourgeoisie of small-business
> proprietors and independent farmers, but a new class whose expertise was
> required to make an industrial economy function: engineers, scientists,
> teachers, doctors, social workers, functionaries, bureaucrats, and other
> professionals and managers who had the know-how to create and control the
> levers of the modern capitalist world [0].

The managerialization of everything does seem very likely, because that is
basically what our current economic regime has been trying to achieve since the
advent of the "digital revolution" (and maybe since Hobbes: a pyramid scheme of
nested managers, where every managed worker is actually a manager automating its
own autonomous subordinates).

Against the view that computers are a tool for rendering every "maker" into a
"manager", I propose meditating on the view propounded by Conal Elliot that
computers should be "telescopes for meaning".

[0]: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

[1]: https://www.michaeljkramer.net/ideas-of-the-pmc/