The process of stratification is not driven by inherent complexity. You're absolutely right in that we still have, and will always have, hard problems to solve in software.
What I'm referring to is the fact that businesses do not have to solve all of these problems. And businesses are what ultimately drive the field. Think of all the other really complicated fields out there. Music, law, medicine. Still hard problems to solve in all of them.
Let's take music as the example at hand. We'll never reach the end of what's possible to accomplish with music. Yet there is an entire industry around it that commodifies musical services. You can spend an entire career focused on something exceedingly arcane like mid-sized arena acoustical materials.
We haven't gotten that way yet with information technology, not because we can't get there, but because the field is still so very very young. Music has been an industry for thousands of years. The modern arena builds on technologies developed for theatre in ancient Greece.
You're right, each advance makes for new problems to solve. But unless you can make a credible claim that this time it's different, the field we inhabit and make a good living exploiting will move the same way every single other engineering field throughout history has always moved.
What I'm referring to is the fact that businesses do not have to solve all of these problems. And businesses are what ultimately drive the field. Think of all the other really complicated fields out there. Music, law, medicine. Still hard problems to solve in all of them.
Let's take music as the example at hand. We'll never reach the end of what's possible to accomplish with music. Yet there is an entire industry around it that commodifies musical services. You can spend an entire career focused on something exceedingly arcane like mid-sized arena acoustical materials.
We haven't gotten that way yet with information technology, not because we can't get there, but because the field is still so very very young. Music has been an industry for thousands of years. The modern arena builds on technologies developed for theatre in ancient Greece.
You're right, each advance makes for new problems to solve. But unless you can make a credible claim that this time it's different, the field we inhabit and make a good living exploiting will move the same way every single other engineering field throughout history has always moved.