The whole "learn to code" and software bootcamp craze always baffled me. Like what other profession markets themselves as "Hey, our job is so easy that any schmuck off the street can enter the career with 4 months of training." Practically every other job I can think of at a similar salary level has entrance requirements (e.g. grad school admissions exams), extensive and expensive training, a lengthy apprenticeship period and follow on licensure exams.

And more directly, I believe good software engineering is really hard. I think it takes a certain mindset to begin with that many people just do not and will never possess, and it takes years of experience to get a good sense of what works and what doesn't, especially with respect to the entire relationship between code, business, people and teams. Yet we constantly see all this devaluation of the practice of software engineering ("code was always the easy part" - bull-fucking-shit), often times by our own practitioners of the craft.

> Call me a gatekeeper if you want but, we ended up with a lot of people that just can't do the job.

Increasingly I am of the opinion that software engineering aught to be a licensed profession, similar to civil engineers, medical professionals, or lawyers. A board of peers to hold you accountable and a license that can be revoked at any time. Additionally legislation could be written to require such licensed individuals in safety critical roles.

I suspect the debate around AI assistance tools would be quite different if there was greater accountability for programmers and a constant threat of losing a license.

If you brick millions of machines impacting hospitals and airports, you should probably never be trusted to write code again.

"One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year."

-John Cook

In my previous job the entire DevOps team were terminators from the gym. I don't know when or how they were attracted to software, and why. There's so many other jobs they could spend time on and be successful rather than writing yamls.

Or it’s just the largely self-taught intrinsically curious autodidact developers and engineers have always been 10x and the “average” person in it for the paycheck is really what a 1xer has always actually been.

I think the industry highly skewed towards the former back in the 90s (and earlier!) when I first entered it. There certainly were vast differences between the best and the worst, but nothing like the gigantic gulf there is today between say a competent kernel driver developer who can get code mainstreamed into Linux vs. a boot camp style disinterested frontend dev who leet coded and brute forced themselves into a FAANG job.

Working closely with other white collar “generic” jobs and the folks who just show up each day and are not interested in the fundamentals at all make me believe this is kind of the baseline for most industries.

Most folks are in it for the money and are happy to just be good enough to not be fired. Since most middle management is utterly incompetent at performance management the results tend to not be great for pretty much the entire corporate white collar industries. A stellar manager though really stands out in such situations, but they are so rare many won’t work for or with one their entire career.