alt Hacker NewsThe author might be missing the intent of the observation. Maybe they’re misinterpreting it.
What I, and many people who’ve said, “code was never the hard part,” aren’t referring to the skill of an individual. It’s not the hard part of the engineering process of developing software. Programming languages have manuals. Many data structures are well documented. There are frameworks for damn near everything. While the difficulty of producing code varies by the skill of the programmer and the complexity of the problem domain; writing and understanding the code is a tractable and straight-forward problem. I can and have taught many people. People can learn.
What most people are referring to is that the hardest parts of producing software are all the things an organization has to do in the production of it. It’s not writing the code that is the hardest part for an organization. It’s getting everyone to understand the problems, working together, gathering requirements, developing specifications, validating releases, testing, etc. It can often look like herding cats and is probably harder.
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1000%. The expense of writing software was and still is high.
Whether it’s commercial software company or an internal team writing custom software, the return on that investment depends on many things outside of the code itself.
Getting everyone to understand the problems, working together, etc, etc are issues that are inherent to organisations.
They’re orthogonal to AI and to the actual hard technical skills needed to execute on a specific strategy. And if the technical skills are lacking, it doesn’t even matter how good an organisation is at collaboration, whereas hard skills plus organisational disfunction are a known successful pattern :)
Many people did look at this through an individual lens and claimed that design skills, domain knowledge are the truly important abilities. I remember reading on HN at least a couple of popular articles claiming that. Actually, they’re all important and having great design skills without matching coding skills is IMO not really possible. The code feeds into the design, the requirements, the architecture and shapes them.
It’s getting everyone to understand the problems, working together (etc)…
There are manuals for this too, and interestingly enough this has been studied since the Romans at least! Is it then really the hard part?