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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 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...

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?

One thing is for certain... the "learn to code" movement was a smug, pompous, and deeply unsympathetic response by privileged knowledge workers toward blue collar workers who experienced mass unemployment a couple times in the last decade, beginning in 2008, and it really pissed off a lot of the people it was directed at. I know a lot of people who did move out of trade and service jobs and learn to code, but very very few who made it far enough to keep those jobs. The guys in the trades are having the last laugh now, and there's no sympathy for coders whose jobs are being taken by AI... largely as a result of the attutide that came with that prescription.

Learn to code wasn't just about careers though. It was also about individual empowerment. Everything goes through computers, and having the power to understand that domain increases agency. For a lot of people, they have no need to ship production grade software that scales to babel. But a custom script that solves an immediate business need is a common thing. I think that aim is more important than the harm learn to code might have caused our profession. And for similar reasons, I feel the agency AI brings to individuals is something that shouldn't be discounted either. No idea what the total calculus on cost benefits turns out to be, but I would hope this benefit is not missed.