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So it's useful to talk about the specific ways in which this argument is dishonest because I think a lot of liberal and left-leaning people are very vulnerable to this rhetorical bludgeon—the idea that you should "listen to experts". But let's unpack what exactly Giggies here means by "experts".

For one thing, "software engineers" as a group are not experts. They don't have some form of accreditation, there's no standard of knowledge required to be a software engineer. "Listen to software engineers" isn't the same category of statement as "listen to climatologists".

For another, programmers are extremely poor at evaluating their own productivity, especially in complex projects, especially when factoring long-run code quality and not just "features shipped". This is something that anyone who has worked in software should be very familiar with.