You're 10 steps ahead of us all and probably living more than 10 years into the future. Yes, programming is a form of literacy. But in todays world, programming is also a job. Just like being a scribe was a job in ancient times, HTML'er was a job 10 years ago (and still is in some places) and programmer is one today (but assembly programmer is a job that is now in large part taken over by compilers).
And that skill has a lot of value to people that don't have that skill or are limited by their own time so we get paid for it. Probably a decent number of years will have to pass before we can call programming 'just a skill' akin to writing.
If you're going to put ideas out that are borderline detached from the current reality it would be great if you gave your thoughts a bit more foundation so you're easier to follow, it just so happens that I saw what you meant but I can also understand why someone who is currently a programmer by profession would in some subtle way feel offended if you called their profession (which is a hard one!) the equivalent of a telephone user or a pencil user.
Perhaps I'm assuming a casual familiarity with some of pg's earlier essays than no longer exists. Although I think the reason I'm getting downvoted isn't for being unclear, but rather for shitting on people's self-identities.
As for being ahead of my time, if you look at the job market today it's true that you do have a lot of people paid purely for their ability to code. These are mostly W2 employees, who work at the kind of places where you start out as a junior developer making 60 - 80k, and then make double that after 8-10 years. And given the current state of society, this is actually a pretty good career path.
However, we also have consultants who bill on a project basis based on value rather than skill, who might easily make 400k a year even as junior developers. (E.g. c.f. patio11's essays.) And we have entrepreneurs and founding team members who get paid largely in stock, the worth of which is largely determined by how much the market values the product.
It's kind of weird because as an industry we definitely need people who have ridiculously good technical skills, to the exclusion of all else. But for the most part programming is a pink-collar job that just happens to be done mostly by men. (In that it requires education, but there is a lot of downward pressure on salaries because the people involved are perceived as being largely interchangeable.) This is why I'll sometimes describe myself as a software developer, but never as a programmer or a software engineer. Because although I know how to code and I might even spend most of the day coding, I don't ever want to work at a job where I'm paid based on my coding ability.
> Although I think the reason I'm getting downvoted isn't for being unclear, but rather for shitting on people's self-identities.
Just to add my two cents, I downvoted your original comment because I thought it made no sense and was bordering on trolling. This reply is much more eloquent and puts it into perspective, so I've upvoted it. I think this is a completely valid and interesting opinion on the "worth" of a programmer, and it's not one that is ever really explored. Our industry tends to focus too much on the general "market value" of developers without considering that they are more than the sum of their skills.
That said, I think you're drawing a line where one does not exist in practice. Very few developers these days are paid to just crank out lines of code. At work, I'm not asked to write a function that takes certain inputs and returns a certain output; I'm tasked with building a feature for a product. This requires much more than the skill of knowing how to code: I have to have a good understanding of the product as a whole, how everything fits together from a technical perspective, and the end users' needs. The titles of "programmer" and "software developer" (and all the other variations) are used interchangeably because the distinction essentially doesn't exist anymore—if you hire a programmer, you're expecting them to know more than just how to write code.
The term you're looking for is 'analist', it was the job of the analyst to tell the programmer exactly what to do. Now we're all analyst-programmers. That makes the programming job that much more interesting but analyst was a separate job for a reason: people with that particular skill were a whole lot more rare than people that could program.
I have a friend who also uses Python as part of his job, but he's a hedge fund manager. Although we're both ostensibly programmers, there is no way we'd be able to successfully do each others jobs, at least not without several years of training. Nor do I think that just knowing Python makes me qualified to be a professional biologist, astronomer, filmmaker, or whatever else people are using it for these days.
That's why I think it's weird to ask how much a programmer should make, since in most cases it's actually the analyst part of the job that determines how much value you're able to create.
And that skill has a lot of value to people that don't have that skill or are limited by their own time so we get paid for it. Probably a decent number of years will have to pass before we can call programming 'just a skill' akin to writing.
If you're going to put ideas out that are borderline detached from the current reality it would be great if you gave your thoughts a bit more foundation so you're easier to follow, it just so happens that I saw what you meant but I can also understand why someone who is currently a programmer by profession would in some subtle way feel offended if you called their profession (which is a hard one!) the equivalent of a telephone user or a pencil user.