In my previous post on why I quit I said

"The industry" is perhaps best explained as working with computers in environments where computers are the focus of activity. This is a bit different from working with computers in environments where the computers support some other activity, the outcomes of which (product or service) can be separated from the computing.

This distinction is likely important because of the impact I believe it has had on my relationship with the tools and practices of the trade.

but then failed to expand on either the distinction or the importance.

It might be most easily explained in terms of what measures success or drives reward in the environment. In a setting where we just so happen to use computers to help make a toy of some kind what matters is making, refining, selling the toy. The computer is auxiliary and can be considered an abstraction. You can be good at using the computer and that expertise can be valuable and recognised, but it matters because more toys are made.

For many years a large segment of the computer-oriented workforce could rely on value and recognition from skill at doing computer stuff. All kinds of stuff. In those settings the computer is a tool that can be applied to many tasks, tasks that are often viewed as "problems".

People from that segment have often referred to themselves as "problem solvers" on their CVs and often were not overtly concerned about the problem domain. What mattered was faculty and flexibility with using, learning, and improving the tools.

I've certainly been in that segment, even expressly identifying myself as someone who was working on improving the improvement of tools.

As "computing" and "internet stuff" has matured and become more deeply embedded in all parts and levels of society it's an inevitable consequence of capitalism (itself not inevitable!) that efficiencies must be found and thus greater focus on outcomes. Much of what society at large wants from computing are now commodities (toys and widgets).

In my (limited) experience interacting with people who are both "computing" adjacent and keen on GenAI they wax lyrical about their ability to produce commodities: apps, lines of code, web sites, implementations of pre-existing algorithms. In this context they have maximised the abstract or auxiliary nature of the computing part (while somehow ignoring the extraordinary economic and environmental footprint of the abstraction) and focused on outcomes. They have switched to a different profession from the one I was in.

That profession of mine, of which I was mostly proud, is not blameless here: Our blithe lack of concern about the problem domain has enabled much that we see as terrible confronting us today. We in the profession had a kind of context blindness and now we (all of we) pay the price.