Software development is in a real interesting situation as its transitioning from a low status job to a high status one. As this progresses you'll see more and more "the customer is always wrong" style blog posts. They are already pretty common already.
Knowing 6502 assembly was a pretty sweet skillset, back in the day.
I'm not sure I've had any job in the last twenty years where I met all the listed requirements.
My impression is that employers want some skill that it's sometimes possible to puzzle together from (but is rarely directly stated in any reasonable way) on the requirements list, then they want you to pass a poorly done faux IQ test.
Then there's a bunch of social stuff, which I don't really understand well enough to treat as anything but random noise. I mean, I can see that it's there and that it's not random, but I can't really see how to change it to my advantage.
Hiring is hard, and nobody, as far as I can tell, is any good at it. But being too specific about what skills they want is not a problem I've personally seen. (Not in the last 20 years in silicon valley, anyhow)
The way I see it, the lowest point may have been the 60s, then it briefly rose in the 80s to "wizards", continued to rise 'till the early 2000s, and now is in sharp decline, as everyone and their dog is now a software developer.
That’s changed lately. With the need for ever more developers the average skill has gone down but that is orthogonal to status in society.
Apparently Japan considers programmers low prestige still for one.
To carry this metaphor a step further, you asking for help on a ticket is more like going to the emergency room. If your ticket is a tummy ache you're going to wait. If it's a gunshot wound to the chest you're going to have all the best staff on hand immediately to put out the fire.
In my experience it massively elevated my status 15 years ago thru now, where it seems to have no effect and perhaps anchor me away from higher level jobs given the value of the output and scarcity of 10x engineers.
I’m happy enough as a simple IC if they pay and treat me well, but that’s not been the case in 5+ years which has me in retirement from the field.
The inverse is also true, while a Noble title will get you a good spot at a traditional restaurant in London - for the most part nobody cares now that they don't employ half the village.
Anecdotal, but the way I sampled the status question is this: 15 years ago, when I told someone I can code, I was seen as some sort of genius. Fast-forward couple of years, and the exchange started to go like this:
"What do you do?"
"I'm a software developer."
"Oh cool. Like my boyfriend and my brother."
My impression is that most people don't see intelligence as a good thing; not socially, at least.
15 or 20 years ago, if I said I was a programmer outside of my chosen peer group, people were more likely to respond like I was someone not worth associating with socially.
Now, people almost treat it like any other high earning professional. My impression was that then, it was only a job you went into if you didn't have opportunities in business or law or whatever. Now? it's on the standard path to both of those, and catching up (but still not there) on renumeration.
My impression is that a lot of the people who came into the industry after me were the sorts who would have gone into business or law in the '90s. This makes me seem a lot more socially normal than I was when I was younger.
So, are writers just people that produce text? I think of them as people that produce systems that are explained and interacted with through text. The product of an author isn't text, it's a a story. The product of a technical writer isn't text, it's distilled knowledge. Text is the medium. I see a lot of parallels with software development.
A well written story can be open to many interpretations, well written software... not so much.
However, I can see some similarities in the mechanics if I squint hard enough.
Well written tools can be reinterpreted for use in many different ways. Is your favorite text editor something you use to write code, or write term papers, or to express your thoughts in diary form, even if it's eventually published online?
Our relationship to the software we use changes over time, even if the software is mostly static. In that respect, maybe software is often like poetry. A lot of the benefit is us finding your own interpretation of usefulness from it. Certain software resonates with some of us while others see little use in it. You'll have to pry Vim from my cold, dead hands, but I don't begrudge anyone their Emacs, or Sublime Text, or whatever they find works well for them.
It's a rosy, romantic view, but I pity the software engineer (or amateur code-monkey, however you identify) that doesn't feel this to at least some degree. The road is long, you might as well find some friends along the way.
The product isnt the text. The product is the entire system designed to keep the text alive, functional, reasonably error free all in a relatively unpredictable environment.
We definitely need to keep considering how other professions manage the unpredictable nature of their work so we can learn. Im just not sure this narrative suits that goal.