Small percentages matter when the game is competitive. Programming is not competitive.
I agree with your argument but I think your analogy is bad.
I agree with your argument but I think your analogy is bad.
I think moreso than most careers, a single software engineer is capable of a tremendous amount of good or harm.
A spouse is capable of a tremendous amount of good or harm, but that doesn't mean marriage is a competition.
I once did some consulting work for a popular technology startup. I was appalled when I saw the hacks they used to get their stuff working.
But their marketing was perfect and all the devs raved about how performant and nice to work with their product was.
But when you looked at the internal code it was clear that a lot of it was written by clueless programmers who did whatever they wanted to get it somehow working. They used the worst hacks to get around the fact that the original product wasn't really built for the area they pivoted into.
That taught me a valuable lesson: everything I thought was important about building a good tech product is irrelevant. As long as it kinda works, you just need someone to sell the thing.
Now, markets aren't always zero-sum. But they are often competitive.
> When I write better code today than I did yesterday, you, my teammate, will be happier, not sadder.
That's also true in football...
Bad analogies suggest different mental models being discussed - what would you suggest is a better analogy - I would be interested in your mental model.
Facebook's biggest threat is not dying on its own, but the possibility of future programmers disrupting it. They're fine with paying billions for companies like Instagram and WhatsApp, because of the possibility that these companies would target the same market and hurt their profit margins. They pay very high amounts to poach employees from other large companies as well.