I think there’s an actual barrier. I’ve seen it, especially since the (until recently) brisk market for programmers was sucking people out of traditional engineering.

It’s puzzling because programming seems so easy and fun. And even before LLM’s, we had StackOverflow after all.

But for some reason a lot of people just hit a wall when they try to learn programming, and we don’t know why. The “CS 101” course at colleges has extremely high attrition.

A minor secondary effect may have been that if you were not a software developer, your boss didn’t want to see you programming.