[BjoernKW]

That's not true. It's a common complaint among engineers that developing line-of-business or CRUD applications is tedious and not challenging enough as it doesn't require a lot of creative thinking.

Truth of the matter is that most tech work doesn't involve AI, machine learning, self-driving cars or augmented reality but down-to-earth business applications. Developing those requires abstract thinking, empathy and problem-solving skills but it doesn't necessarily require a college-level IQ.

In fact a high IQ could even be harmful in that situation because apart from getting bored quickly highly intelligent people can display a tendency to overthink problems (which is probably how many notorious enterprise frameworks came about ...).

[briholt]

You've clearly never met a person who is unable to place a hanger inside of a shirt and hang it on a rack, or a person who can't sort 5 single-digit numbers mentally. What you are describing are 120+ IQ problems.

[BjoernKW]

You make this sound like someone with an IQ less than 120 is mentally impaired.

An IQ of 100 is defined as the median IQ level for a population. The range between 90 and 130 covers the whole gamut of human intelligence that's commonly considered normal.

Much of the day-to-day work in IT often doesn't need original thinking but merely skillful application of known methods and patterns, which in turn doesn't require a college education.

[briholt]

Find one successful programmer at Google/Apple/Facebook/Cisco/etc. with an IQ of 90. Remembering basic equations, keeping long sequences of functions sorted in your head, even understanding FTP/Git/CL instructions require this level cognitive ability. When you deal with people who can't hang shirts you'll start to understand this. There are just under 200 million Americans with IQs between "can't hang shirts" and "productive programmer."

[BjoernKW]

> Find one successful programmer at Google/Apple/Facebook/Cisco/

Point proven, eh? I'm not talking about these people (though I surmise there are quite a few in these companies as well who don't have that level of intelligence and simply tag along ...) but about the vast majority of IT workers working on some supposedly 'boring' database application.

Google and Apple in particular have been known for hiring highly qualified engineers only to then have them maintain some run-of-the-mill administrative software they're vastly overqualified to work on.

[FLUX-YOU]

>doesn't require a lot of creative thinking

It doesn't, but you still need "higher level" developers to cover security and concurrent/parallel/distributed problems and maybe architecture.

It's not that someone can't also learn that stuff, but exposing a product publicly without some experience in those areas is asking for trouble.

IMO, Software is resisting division of labor and work by collapsing roles into "Full stack devs" or "DevOps Engineers".

[BjoernKW]

I agree there have to be different skill levels but I think that distinction has to occur within denominations like 'full stack' and 'DevOps'. These labels simply determine what you do not how skilled you're at it.

In my opinion, full stack and DevOps is the normal, sane way of approaching software development. Artificially dividing up roles into labels such as 'front-end', 'back-end', 'database programmer', 'system administrator' only leads to more silos, less collaboration and sometimes even downright hostility between these roles.