Software developers have been undergoing commodification for the last 10 years and it has gotten more aggressive over the last 5 years. I suspect that the reason for this trend was to make room for middle managers and HR people whose primary purpose is suppressing developer salaries whilst inflating their own.

Thankfully, this approach has been a disaster and I'm cautiously optimistic that under tougher economic conditions, company directors will be forced to abandon this horrible 'egalitarian' and maximalist job creation mindset in favour of leaner and more capable technical teams with fewer managers.

It doesn't make sense to commodify complex products or complex services. Commodification only makes sense for simple products and services where the details don't matter... This is clearly not the case with software development. In software development, details are everything. Complexity and costs grow exponentially when you have a flawed incentive structure which rewards office politics over technical competence.