I did, and I somewhat agree with `richmarr. The author of the blog does have a point, and it's not really wrong much, but I've come to the fairly strong opinion it's an unhelpful thing to complain about publically. (Which is a slightly ironic stance, I admit.)
As a plant engineer, you're going to have to part out and understand a system in its entirety at some point. And you'll be rating bolts and nuts and greases and such to meet the specification you need. There are a lot of bolts to choose from. It's the same for chips or components when designing a circuit: there are lots of transistors to choose from. For many tasks, many will effectively be interchangable. Sometimes you'll need to be careful, and other times you'll be working on a system where you'll need to research the manufacturer to make sure they're likely to be still in business in ten years.
But you'd never reasonably complain about the choice. Nor about all the regular folk just building a porch out of some wood and screws from Home Depot. You wouldn't complain about a kid learning circuitry by plopping some random components from Radio Shack into a breadboard (which they'll never move to a proper PCB). And I don't see why you'd complain about millions of people interacting with software the same way. Learning to deal with the glut is as simple as going to a curated aggregator (Home Depot/Radio Shack) or becoming an engineer.
I've seen the sort of stuff non-programmers inflict on systems. I'm not even talking about JS on the web, but like simple relay-equivalent ladder logic on heavy machinery. It's just as bad there. But. Work needs to get done, production needs to move forward, and craftsmanship is expensive and time consuming. There's a place for the cowboy programmer, just as there is for the craftsman.
So it seems a bit silly to complain about the situation. To me, it just means software is becoming an industry just like any other.
To me, it seems more like what's happening is a lot of people think it's less interesting to work on an existing, established product than to rewrite it altogether or make a new one and so we're seeing a steady procession of neat but immature frameworks instead of a mature one gaining steam. This, to me, is a problem because it means programmers waste a ton of time learning the incantations for a new framework instead of focusing on the actual problems they're trying to solve. It's like if you switched between similar programming languages for every new project you started without becoming very familiar with any of them.
As a plant engineer, you're going to have to part out and understand a system in its entirety at some point. And you'll be rating bolts and nuts and greases and such to meet the specification you need. There are a lot of bolts to choose from. It's the same for chips or components when designing a circuit: there are lots of transistors to choose from. For many tasks, many will effectively be interchangable. Sometimes you'll need to be careful, and other times you'll be working on a system where you'll need to research the manufacturer to make sure they're likely to be still in business in ten years.
But you'd never reasonably complain about the choice. Nor about all the regular folk just building a porch out of some wood and screws from Home Depot. You wouldn't complain about a kid learning circuitry by plopping some random components from Radio Shack into a breadboard (which they'll never move to a proper PCB). And I don't see why you'd complain about millions of people interacting with software the same way. Learning to deal with the glut is as simple as going to a curated aggregator (Home Depot/Radio Shack) or becoming an engineer.
I've seen the sort of stuff non-programmers inflict on systems. I'm not even talking about JS on the web, but like simple relay-equivalent ladder logic on heavy machinery. It's just as bad there. But. Work needs to get done, production needs to move forward, and craftsmanship is expensive and time consuming. There's a place for the cowboy programmer, just as there is for the craftsman.
So it seems a bit silly to complain about the situation. To me, it just means software is becoming an industry just like any other.