The thing that makes me crazy about this article, others like it (and so many of the comments in response to them ) is the naive assumption that whatever the author is used to is always the case.

It's just not. I've been a developer for 25+ years, and in technical diligence looking at companies getting investments for seven, and have done diligence on 100+ companies. It's ALL OVER THE PLACE. It depends on the product, the company, the team, the way the company is managed, the business domain, etc.

For some companies, products, and teams.. the code absolutely is the hard part, and building that insanely sophisticated software is worth millions. I've seen scientific software that sold for millions of dollars per copy.

For others, the code is essentially commodity plumbing around some operational knowledge of a domain that makes nice dough with minimal code complexity. I've also seen founders who were going to spend the rest of their days floating around the bahamas because they wrote the right PHP-ball-of-mud in the right domain at the right time, sigh.

The world of software is vastly broader than the vast majority of programmers think. And there are a lot of very, very different ways to make money in it.