Our highly educated grads on the scrapheap

[Menelaus]

When you put it that way we really should moan a little bit less.

Not sure, tbh. All generalisations are dangerous, including this one, remember?

[expat]

I think that part of the problem is the increasing generic nature of business processes and information systems.
..... Its all been done, reducing so-called software "engineers" to software "implementors". Anybody who has the time or inclination to design their own framework will invariably run into 90% of the design and implementation issues that the other opensource framework ran into.

In a nutshell, 50% of what was a software design and development task 8 years ago is now a configuration and implementation task.....

Quite so. When I was writing real code, up to and including single-handed implementation of accounting sub-systems, I was well aware that I was building a wheel from scratch: many others would have done exactly the same thing before, usually the same way.

I didn't really have a problem with that: I've long regarded software writing as a kind of engineering, and an engineer doesn't expect to be the first to face the same problems (but still nobody calls his work cut'n'paste because it isn't).

Now it is indeed true that the common elements are more systematised, and I personally make a living configuring rather than coding. ISTM that it still takes many of the same skills, with the exception that you can configure badly and get away with it. But it still needs specialists.

[Mich the Tester]

Quite so. When I was writing real code, up to and including single-handed implementation of accounting sub-systems, I was well aware that I was building a wheel from scratch: many others would have done exactly the same thing before, usually the same way.

I didn't really have a problem with that: I've long regarded software writing as a kind of engineering, and an engineer doesn't expect to be the first to face the same problems (but still nobody calls his work cut'n'paste because it isn't).

Now it is indeed true that the common elements are more systematised, and I personally make a living configuring rather than coding. ISTM that it still takes many of the same skills, with the exception that you can configure badly and get away with it. But it still needs specialists.

Yes. As a tester I come across apps that have been built by a tool monkey and apps that have been built from scratch by an experienced programmer who migt use a tool just to help him here and there but who will go through his code checking for faults and cleaning up the spaghetti that the tool produces. The first category are no fun at all; you find bugs too easily and there's no challenge to it. Usually you'll find that the tool monkey understands nothing about internal memory and when the tester forces an error message using incorrect input he can screw up the whole app, because the input can't be corrected properly; the tool monkey doesn't understand the need to clear up old instances. The second category is far more challenging and actually makes testing enjoyable; trouble is you can go for days without reporting errors and then some numpty 'managerman' with no IT training starts moaning that 'there are not enough bugs being found'.