I so completely want to agree with you. If this were anything other than JavaScript agreeing with your comment would be simple.
I wrote JavaScript in the corporate world for 15 years. Here is the reality:
* Almost nobody wants to do it. The people that get paid for it don't want to do it. They just want to get paid. The result is that everybody who does get paid for it completely sucks. Complete garbage, at least at work. There a lot of amazing people writing JavaScript, just not at work, and why would they try harder. Delivering quality at work far outside the bell curve just results in hostility aside for some very rare exceptions. My exception was when I was doing A/B testing for a major .com.
* Since everybody in the corporate JavaScript world completely sucks every major project eventually fails from a business perspective or stalls into lifeless maintenance mode. It just gets too expensive to maintain 5+ years later or too fragile to pivot to the next business demand. So, it has to get refactored or rebuilt. Sometime that means hoping the next generation framework is ready, and the business is willing to train people on it, and willing to go through growing pains. More often this means calling in outside parties who can do it correctly the first time. Its not about scale. Its about the ability to actually build something original and justify every hour productively. I was on both sides of that fence.
* The reason why the corporate overlords hire outside parties to fix problems from internal teams isn't just about talent. Keep in mind it's tremendously expensive. Yes, those people are capable of producing something that doesn't suck and do so faster. The bigger issue is that they will always deliver reliably, because they are executing under a contract with a work performance statement. The internal teams do not have a contract performance definition that will kill their careers or terminates their incomes. They just have to hope the business remains financial solvent so they don't get caught in a mass layoff. This breeds a lot of entitlement and false expectations that seem to grow on each other.
So, yes, in this case it really is about the ability to write code physically. Yes, you need to juggle client nonsense and have soft skills too, but those are layered on top of just being able to write the code. When your options are limited to a bunch of 0s that depend on copy/paste from predefined framework templates you need somebody who can actually justify their existence in a very practical solutions delivery way.
That might be a problem in the frontend/JavaScript world, but I think people forget the industry is a lot bigger than web dev. I've managed to go my whole career without ever having to write a single line of JavaScript.
But to be fair your point, and the original authors, isn't a bad one. And I think someone else in this thread said it too. If you're only skill is typing out code against a very narrow spec that someone else did all the work to figure out, you're probably in trouble.
I wrote JavaScript in the corporate world for 15 years. Here is the reality:
* Almost nobody wants to do it. The people that get paid for it don't want to do it. They just want to get paid. The result is that everybody who does get paid for it completely sucks. Complete garbage, at least at work. There a lot of amazing people writing JavaScript, just not at work, and why would they try harder. Delivering quality at work far outside the bell curve just results in hostility aside for some very rare exceptions. My exception was when I was doing A/B testing for a major .com.
* Since everybody in the corporate JavaScript world completely sucks every major project eventually fails from a business perspective or stalls into lifeless maintenance mode. It just gets too expensive to maintain 5+ years later or too fragile to pivot to the next business demand. So, it has to get refactored or rebuilt. Sometime that means hoping the next generation framework is ready, and the business is willing to train people on it, and willing to go through growing pains. More often this means calling in outside parties who can do it correctly the first time. Its not about scale. Its about the ability to actually build something original and justify every hour productively. I was on both sides of that fence.
* The reason why the corporate overlords hire outside parties to fix problems from internal teams isn't just about talent. Keep in mind it's tremendously expensive. Yes, those people are capable of producing something that doesn't suck and do so faster. The bigger issue is that they will always deliver reliably, because they are executing under a contract with a work performance statement. The internal teams do not have a contract performance definition that will kill their careers or terminates their incomes. They just have to hope the business remains financial solvent so they don't get caught in a mass layoff. This breeds a lot of entitlement and false expectations that seem to grow on each other.
So, yes, in this case it really is about the ability to write code physically. Yes, you need to juggle client nonsense and have soft skills too, but those are layered on top of just being able to write the code. When your options are limited to a bunch of 0s that depend on copy/paste from predefined framework templates you need somebody who can actually justify their existence in a very practical solutions delivery way.