Success Quote by Bill Budge

Confidence used to be a competitive advantage in tech; Budge is pointing at the moment it stopped being enough. "I'm a great coder" lands like a credential, then immediately gets walked back. That reversal is the tell: he is describing a market where skill has been commoditized, where being technically excellent no longer guarantees attention, leverage, or identity. The line "not pushing that so much anymore" reads like a quiet pivot from maker pride to strategist pragmatism.

The subtext is less humility than triage. Budge isn't denying competence; he's demoting it. Greatness, once rare, is now a baseline, and he signals that the real differentiators have moved upstream and downstream: choosing the right problems, shipping reliably, understanding users, navigating organizations, selling a vision, assembling teams. In other words, coding is necessary but increasingly insufficient as a personal brand in business.

The quote also captures a generational shift in the tech myth. Early computing culture rewarded the singular "wizard" narrative; contemporary software is built by swarms, supported by open-source libraries, platforms, and AI tools that amplify output. When "thousands" can do what you do, the scarce resource becomes taste, judgment, and the ability to make software matter in the world.

As a businessman, Budge is telling you where to place your chips: not on raw ability, but on positioning. It's a sober acknowledgement that in an industry obsessed with meritocracy, the scoreboard keeps changing - and the winners are the ones who notice first.