Agreed. There is a strong drive in industry to commoditize "coding". For example, the wide proliferation of bootcamps. The world being what it is, if the perceived skill is equal companies would prefer to hire the cheaper 20 year old bootcamp grad vs the more expensive 45 yr old. So it's important to grow your skills and knowledge in areas that are not vulnerable to bootcamp commodification.
It’s not just coders who are commoditized. I find every specialist gets commoditized in the mind of people who are not specialists in that specific field. “He’s a programmer, he’s a quant, he’s a surgeon, he’s an astronaut...”. It’s because we have biases where we believe our own path is a bit harder than everyone else’s. I think it’s natural because everyone has a clearer sense of their own struggles, but only a superficial sense of the struggles endured to acquire expertise they don’t have. Furthermore we have a bias that insufficiently accounts for expertise atrophy so we tend to think of our expertise as the accumulation of all our experience but if we applied the right discount function we’d see that expertise has to be deliberately practiced to be acculumulated to the level in our egos. Few experts do that. The net effect is that the world doesn’t value our own expertise as much as we are inclined to ourselves.
In addition to all the bootcamps, just look at the mania in primary school education about getting every kid to learn to code. If that isn't just a fad and it keeps going on through secondary and beyond then in the next decade or two the commoditization of coding will be complete.
