I kind of think the whole "Learn to Code" push of the 2010s was one of the worst things that …

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…

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.

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 w…

> 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 licence 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 licence. If you brick millions of machines impacting hospitals and airports, you should probably never be trusted to write code again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou...

But how many of those bootcamp people actually went on to get software jobs? One of the big criticisms of that whole phenomenon that I recall is that people were graduating them and then were unable or unprepared to actually get a job in the industry? So how many people "learned to code" and then ended up back on non-software related careers?

I tried to get a job back then but never could. Its wild to read to me that it was 'sink or swim' back then. Nobody wanted to hire a junior. So I never became a SWE and it was my passion since 14. Now I just don't care and too much time has passed.

I understand your point and ultimately agree with the systemic problems here. And, as a "Learn to Code" guy who's had a successful and interesting career filled with self-study and continual improvement, I'll call you a gatekeeper.

I'm a bootcamp graduate, 10 years of experience. My mentor is a bootcamp graduate. I've worked with him for most of my career and he is a very experienced systems engineer, often mentoring and coaching folks with masters degrees in CS. Together, with a lot of other team members of course, with him being the principal engineer, we've exited multiple companies. We were both fortunate to have mentors earlier in our careers. I've interviewed many bootcamp graduates. You're right. Many of them can't do the job. We don't hire those guys. But that begs the question - what companies are hiring incompetent people?