“Writting the code was never the hard part”

It’s figuring out in detail what the program is suppose to do (i.e. Requirements), how it can and should do it given the technical constraints of the available deployment environment and performance & reliability requirements (i.e. Technical Analysis) and how it all gets structured from the highest level to the lowest level so that bugs are minimized, performance is suitable with the appropriate margin to absorb expect unexpected problems and costs for maintenance and future requirements implementation are low (i.e. from Technical Architecture and Systems Design down to Software Design) that are hard.

And I say this as somebody who has done all of those professionally, plus the coding (oh, so, so much coding) for systems of all kinds and sizes in various countries and industries, including some mission critical high performance distributed systems (which if they failed would have cost millions of $$$ in lost business income).

Fly by the seat of their pants coders who have never worked in a properly professional environment have no fucking clue just how much more there is to it than “coding” to go from no software at all to “reliable and robust software system that serves existing business needs”.

A lot of “coders” are like I was in the beginning of my career: they think they’re the shit, know nothing but a very limited range of work environments which they think “that’s how things are done” when those environments are actually, amateur hour, every hour of every day, every day of the month, every month of the year - they’re basically at the peak point of the Dunning-Krugger curve for software development knowledge.