I vehemently disagree with this. Kludging together an unmaintainable codebase that barely meets the spec might be easy. Aiming for a notably higher level quality beyond that is NOT an easy thing at all.

Obviously, the nature of this discussion depends on the complexity of the task at hand. There are many profitable ventures with low levels of complexity in the software implementation, and your comment may hold true for such scenarios.

However, there also many ventures that require significantly complex software to meet their goals, and will require skilled developers to have any hope of not collapsing under the weight of shoddy implementations and impenetrable abstractions.

On one of my previous jobs one problem domain was some area of theoretical physics. There was a guy with brilliant understanding of the problem domain. He had couple of decades of experience teaching physics in the country’s best university. He could explain very hard problems in easy to understand way. The company filed multiple patents with the amazing stuff he invented.

It didn’t help the guy to write code. It wasn’t good. Not only unmaintainable, also slow and unstable (not all algorithms work equally well when mathematically-real numbers are substituted by software-real IEEE754 floats). We ended up just throwing out whatever he coded, and instead learned enough problem domain from him to be able to understand and implement what he actually was trying to do.

Developing transferrable strategic and architectural skills between verticals (client facing, or technologies) is a key aspect that I see being missed with programmers.

No framework will make or keep your career, nor will a specific language or piece of tech. Knowing how to apply technology well, in a way that doesn't need to be entirely thrown away every 2-3 years is invaluable, and as a result increases a developers value.