Yup! I was a part of the learn to code industry. I am proud of that, bc I know my worker helped a lot of marginalized people gain wealth and power (woo!). My own occupation, stats and econometrics, requires years of higher education to even begin (and decades to master), and yet ~ half of SWE were looking down on me, disrespecting me. To be clear, there were many who were not, but usually they were from some marginalized group: women, autistic, person of color, gay, person from a poor country, etc. I thought, why is my towering knowledge not being respected? Ah, the patriarchy combined with SWE. And then as time went on I just started using my knowledge for myself / those that know and that’s worked out well (bc it’s based on actually knowing math as opposed to relying on the patriarchy).

I think it’s possible the industry eventually figures out that statisticians and econometricians know far more than CS / SWEs (bc AI will tell people), but it could be a decade from now.

When I got my first job, it was in the early 1990s at one of the major consulting firms. I had a just completed a computer science undergrad degree, but a lot of the people in my "start group" had no significant programming experience, or maybe not any. Some were English or History or Econ majors. They had used computers in school, but not written programs. Everyone went through an in-house boot camp to learn how to program using the firm's standard methodologies. Everyone came out of it with enough skill to be assigned to client projects and start writing code.

Software jobs at that time paid pretty well but certainly not the crazy salaries that came in the dot-com era and after. They were just pretty good jobs, and anyone who was reasonably smart could learn to do them in a couple of months. Somewhere along the line we stopped thinking that, and started thinking that you had to be some sort of high priest savant to write code that responds to a mouse click.

Yep. There's also been a relentless push for the past two decades or so to standardize many aspects of software development:

* programming languages (JS)

* frameworks (React)

* open source libraries

* platforms (Web, mostly)

* design systems (shadcn for newer apps)

Guess what makes it easier for automation to come in?

Our need for it to be easy and standard contributed to the success of LLM use in software engineering. I suspect it would have done well without some of those factors, but it may have taken longer.