>If all that mattered was the code and the systems, and people were cogs that produced code that businesses wanted to optimise, then none of these actions make sense.

No, No... Of course all that matters isn't just the code. My framing was about how organizations model the work SWE do economically.

>Visual programming was going to destroy the industry, where any idiot could drag and drop a few boxes and put together software. Turns out that didn't work out and now visual programming is all but dead. Then we had consultants and software consultancies. Why keep engineers on staff and have to deal with benefits and HR functions when you can hire consultants for just long enough to get the job done and end their contracts. Then we had offshoring. Why hire expensive developers in markets like California when you can hire far cheaper engineers abroad in a country with lower wages and laxer employment law. (It's not a quality thing either, many of these engineers are unquestionably excellent.)

It seems like we're agreeing along the same tangent. With this argument, you're admitting that businesses do see SWE as cogs in a wheel and seasonally try to replace them... The seasonality of 'make the engineer replaceable' fads really does point to businesses trying to simplify what devs actually do since most of what they measure is working code output because it’s a tangible artifact (this is waht the OP meant by implying being a working code producer at work). Knowledge, judgment, architectural intuition, and domain understanding are harder to quantify, so they disappear from the model even though they ARE the real constraint. So for the record, I do agree with you that code isn't everything but I maintain that SWEs are modelled based on working codes produced even in more successful companies that invest in domain knowledge and long-term system understanding.

Metrics, performance reviews, sprint velocity, delivery timelines, all orbit around observable artifacts because those are what management systems can actually track objectively and equitably. It's a handy abstraction just like looking only at the ins/outs of a logic gate as opposed to looking at the implementation and wiring. Of course, a NOT gate would get upset over being called a 'bit flipper', it's not all thar physically exists but from our POV, it doesn't exactly matter. This applies to human labor even if a leaky abstraction w