And that ladies and gentlemen is exactly how American IT became taken over by Indian outsourcing companies and the quasi ones like Deloitte , Accenture. American exceptionalism and a good education system might make you a great consultant but who turns that spec to code and does the grunt work ? Surely you aren't hiring American college grads because they have already been told this work is boring and shitty and they are special and should build domain expertise or salesmanship . Don't get me wrong - it's an excellent article but I think this is targeted towards developers with experience who also understand the big picture (accounting , P&L, systems). However doing implementations , turning spec to code , reusing it are great ways to enter the IT industry with solid pay and something that American college grads encouraged to take up for a solid middle class life . Infact community colleges and colleges should teach those skills similar to how it's done in India. (No I am not a Trump supporter).

Undertook a rewrite of grant tracking system for an NGO. The first solution was butchered by one these 'consulting' firms. They had set up fragmented Google Sheets, Trello and MSSQL and lots of repetition. Non-programmers shouldn't undertake this kind of work. The majority of the work was data cleansing to get rid of duplicates and normalising the database to 3NF. The rest is a user-friendly frontend to enter data and some data validation. Our solution worked out cheaper than the 'consulting' firm's and actually increased productivity.

I don't think that's true. Both paths he's describing are relatively lucrative. There are plenty of native born developers getting solid pay to do the less prestigious work of implementing specs.

It's just moving up the "value chain" is a lot more lucrative. The advice here applies to ambitious people who want to get paid even more.