I think we also have to recognise that the days of working in the same company for 40 years or until you die are long gone. For many people, career progression is not something that happens within the same organisation, but by moving from one job to another. Perhaps this is just the other side of the same coin -- in order to 'hop the gap' in career progression, you actively have to seek another job on the other side.
I think a lot of young-ish folks experienced rapid job changes over the past 15 years, because we lived through the explosive early growth of the Internet. But there's also evidence that that time is over.
The tech industry is consolidating, and there are plenty of huge stable companies to provide long-term careers. I don't see any reason that a young engineer couldn't sign on with Google or Facebook out of college and stay there for 40 years.
That doesn't solve the problem, it merely changes its name. There has always been the need to match workers to tasks.
In stable, large companies this was done with middle managers and human resources departments, which meant that you nominally got to keep the same "job". Remove that, and there's still a need to allocate resources, that now will be filled with things like the API's the article talks about, or "freelance-like" human resources companies.
Workers will still keep a stable relation to the APIs they know (as learning a new one takes time and effort). The only thing lost in this name change is the safety network of a legal work contract.
