[intarga]

The means of production for a programmer is not always as simple as just a computer.

At my last job I wrote a driver for a proprietary framework to talk to closed hardware units, which made lots of money. I could not have done this without the company's license as a developer for the framework, or without the protocol specification for the hardware units. In this case, the company I worked for owned the means of production, not me, so it's perhaps unsurprising that I got a very tiny cut of the fruits of my labour.

[raxxorrax]

No, I was referring to the knowledge you have, not to the device you are currently using. Compared to the beginning of the industrial revolution, where factories could only ever be build by extremely wealthy individuals that could afford the expensive machines, today we have a situation that the hardware becomes cheaper and cheaper and the skill set of workers become the most prominent resource. I would indeed expect your situation becoming more and more rare.

Edit: or maybe not rarer, but the costs of machine and license become smaller compared to your wage.

[chrismmay]

I concur. Most custom financial software interfaces with systems that a developer could never get access to without the sponsorship of an institution. It’s really, really hard to write good software without a test environment. Mostly because specs and docs are always riddled with errors or omissions, if they exist at all.