I have read this paragraph a few times and I still cannot put my finger on why i disagree with it, but disagree I do. First off the fact that Coders receive high salaries. prestige and stock options is more to do with market forces than anything else. Making 'hello world' appear on the screen may be gratifying but that's reductive to what the coders are doing. The reason they are highly esteemed (be it money, respect etc) is the fact that they are doing something difficult that also has a limited number of people who can do it, can the same be said of community management? I'm certain its difficult but is there a low number of people who can do it? The same could be said of painting, writing in terms of them being 'making' something. They were also once perceived as being done by men exclusively but that changed, the same is true of coding. In some future time when women coders are as common as men coders I guess this entire point becomes moot. It seems like this is an argument against market forces rather than against 'creators'.In Silicon Valley, this divide is often explicit: As Kate Losse has noted, coders get high salary, prestige, and stock options. The people who do community management—on which the success of many tech companies is based—get none of those. It’s unsurprising that coding has been folded into "making." Consider the instant gratification of seeing "hello, world" on the screen; it’s nearly the easiest possible way to "make" things, and certainly one where failure has a very low cost.
Code is "making" because we've figured out how to package it up into discrete units and sell it, and because it is widely perceived to be done by men.
Exactly, If good, talented programmers were in heavy abundance, those stock options and high salaries would quickly dissipate. There are plenty of "makers" that don't earn squat and end up at tiny booths at local library craft fairs, which is fine, but a far cry from high salaries and stock options. Supply and demand, it's that simple.
I agree. I think the author misplaces the problem of undervaluation of one class of work with the overvaluation of another. IMO many folk outside the humanities underestimate the depths of them. Similarly, many in the humanities underestimate the depths of scientific and technological fields. Whenever humans enter a field in earnest, that field is advanced to the limits of human potential. Coders aren't paid more than non-coders because of a cultural bias.