> And a horse breeder was important to transportation until the 1920s, but it doesn't mean their job was transportation. They didn't magically become great truck drivers.

Again: unrelated and pointless analogy. The horse breeder would be analogous to chipmakers or companies that make computers. Turns out they have more of a job than ever. They don’t need to “become truck drivers.”

> Programmers do not deliver products, they deliver code to make products.

That’s not even a little bit true. Programmers deliver product every day: see every single startup on the planet, and most companies.

Moreover, you said programmer. I didn’t.

I said software engineer/architect, as that was what the parent comment asked.

I chose my words intentionally. I am referring to people who engage in the act of engineering or architecting software, which is definitely not limited to writing code.

Yes, a pure programmer (aka a researcher or a junior programmer) may not fare as well, for the reasons you mentioned.

But that was never who we were discussing.

If you still think the code is the point, I’m not sure we’re going to see eye to eye, and I’m going to just agree to disagree. And if that’s the case, then you’re right: you may be left behind, keyboard in hand.

It's well understood that programming interviews are a pretty shitty tool. They're a proxy for understanding if you have basic skills required to understand a computer. Notably, most companies don't rely on these alone, they have behavioral questions, architecture questions, etc. Have you ever done an interview at these companies you're talking about? They're 8 hours lol maybe 1 is spent programming.

But it's just very obvious to any software engineer worth anything that code is just one part of the job, and it's usually somewhere in the middle of a process. Understanding customer requirements, making technical decisions, maintaining the codebase, reviewing code changes/ providing feedback, responding on incidents, deciding what work to do or not to do, deciding when a constraint has to be broken, etc. There are a billion things that aren't "typing code" that an engineer does every day. To deny this is absurd to anyone who lives every day doing those things.

> Is that why most prestigious jobs grilled you like a devil on algos/system design?

No. That’s because interviews have always sucked, and have always been terrible predictors of how you do on the job. We just never had a better way of deciding except paying for a project.

> That’s just nonsense. It’s like saying “delivering product was always the most important thing, not drinking water”.

That’s… not an argument? It’s not even a strawman, it’s just unrelated.

The thing a customer has always paid for was the end product. Not the code. This is absolutely trivial to see, since a customer has never asked to read the code.