[namelost]

If you want to know just how hard programming is, try teaching it to someone.

Programmers have to remember a vast amount of domain knowledge. Consider the basic task of choosing where you are going to store some data, well first you need to know which options exist and there's dozens of them (do you want Postgres, SQLite, Redis, LevelDB, ..?). Then you need to know the strengths and weaknesses of each. And I hope you have been keeping your knowledge up-to-date because the answer in 2018 is very different to the answer in 2008.

The lack of barriers to entry actually makes it harder. There are "law schools" and "med schools" to teach you all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor. There is no "programming school", every programmer is self-taught. A computer science degree hardly scratches the surface.

While there are specialisms, such as game development or embedded development, most programmers are expected to be generalists. You may find yourself needing to write networking code, and there's a whole bunch of knowledge that goes along with that. Or, many programmers end up having a working knowledge of cryptography.

Sure, almost anybody can learn JavaScript or Python, and write code, but learning a programming language is only 1% of the job.

[giobox]

> There are "law schools" and "med schools" to teach you all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor.

Programmer now, gained a law degree in a previous life. Know lots of folks who studied medicine.

The idea that med school or law school teach you "all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor" is laughable and a truly absurd statement. The sheer size of the problem domains these subjects cover alone renders this impossible, and furthermore I'd argue it's pretty insulting to insinuate that Computer Science is somehow more difficult in this regard.

While I can't speak fully for medics, a law degree "hardly scratches the surface" as you put it either.

[u801e]

> While I can't speak fully for medics

Medical school will teach you the basic science and theory and give you basic clinical experience, one still needs to complete a 3 to 7 year residency in the field one wants to practice in. Then there are fellowships that one may want to do if they want to specialize even further.

It's definitely not the case that you learn everything you need to know in school.

[laythea]

I don't think that is what he/she meant. I don't know what your professional software experience has been like, but software is applied and required to some extent in all industries nowadays, and therefore there is a broader scope required. It is also more of a moving target. I'm a contractor providing software engineering services. One contract I might be doing Subsea control systems, the next OpenGL graphics hardware programming sprinkled with Java and Eclipse, the next contract may be embedded assembly language for turbine control systems etc. Law/Medicine maybe moving, but I am fairly certain a doctor or lawyer does not "move as fast". They tend to stay specialised in maybe an area or two. In fact, for a serious medical condition, from a patients point of view, I would be quite alarmed to be seen by a doctor that has not "specialised" in my condition. Ideally, one that does nothing but my condition. I think it is easier for a doctor/lawyer to fall into the trap of becoming specialised in one or two areas alone than a software engineer, simply for the fact that if I did not constantly have to become specialised in a new area, usually for every contract), then I would not be able to pay the bills. So I imagine that is what he/she meant.

[hobbyjogger]

Your point is a good one, but to me it confirms the comment you are responding to.

> The idea that med school or law school teach you "all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor" is laughable and a truly absurd statement. The sheer size of the problem domains these subjects cover alone renders this impossible

You seem to be an example of a programmer that can be good and proficient in many different fields, languages, and scopes. You don't really see that in law or medicine. Doctors can't jump around from orthopedic surgeon to psychiatrist to dermatologist. And it's very uncommon (at least for lawyers under 60 or so) to be both a corporate lawyer and a litigator.

As giobox mentioned, the sheer size of the domains of law and medicine all but require doctors and lawyers to specialize. That's certainly true to some extent with computer science but it doesn't seem to be quite as strong in that field.

[laythea]

I think you misinterpreted me a little. I think the reason that lawyers and doctors cannot "jump around" is not because, for example, a lawyer cannot absorb the information required to be both a good corporate lawyer and a good litigator, due to it being too much. They can. It is that the system that they choose to be in (law/medicine) demands the individual to be certified and formally trained to such an extent that it cripples this kind of professional mobility. This is not true in software. Not because of any other reason other than society is catching up. Unlike the fields of law and medicine, where those fields are growing "linearly" with society. It is also the reason that I do not by law require to be a chartered engineer to perform my job to the full extent.

[ABCLAW]

The (jurisdictions will have their own phrasing) 'demand' placed upon lawyers is that they are competent at the work they're doing.

The magnitude of knowledge needed to push a company to become public or undergo a merger, to litigate a divorce with children in custody, to defend an individual in a murder trial, or to litigate an aboriginal rights claim is substantial and there is very little overlap between them.

The issue isn't the regulatory requirement for competence - it's that the fields of specialization require years to become decent in.

[ACow_Adonis]

I have limited idea whether its fundamentally barriers in terms of the subject-matter (because I do not know or practice in multiple fields of medicine) or in terms of the social structure (where it is pretty obvious the highly structured/time-based hierarchical regulated fields).

But I will say one of the MAJOR things that I LOVE about programming is its relative lack of artificial and social barriers. In psyche, med, law, science: even if i am good enough to pick something up in 6-12 months, or even if I have already been studying or been experienced in said field (say because I have a family member who has been surreptitiously teaching me or bringing me along on the side), there is an inescapable time, money, and social barrier that is effectively immutable.

I can't REALLY do law/medicine without running them in serial, paying the fixed costs of time/money for both (which almost no one has), and I can't fast-track through either or leap-frog students or peers of lesser ability. And god help you if, half-way through, you then think that something in chem/physics might be interesting and applicable. Or if you have the insight/ability to say: i think i'd learn more over there (well too bad, these are the requirements for the program and this is the course structure and this is what you need to do to get your practicing certificate...and except in exceptional circumstances, that's even if you had someone in a position of authority who would agree with you).

Those barriers have not yet been established effectively in programming. Sure, some people tried earlier to establish things like certification and structure, and we're now starting to see the germination of university degrees in arbitrary specializations, and that force will always be there, but few people take them comparatively seriously. The barriers to entry are low (you could almost always even just pirate some software to get started and install it on relatively cheap generic hardware). And if you want to apply it to different fields, you quickly find the barriers aren't generally from the computing/programming side, but from the social/structural barriers inherent in those fields in our society.

Now to be sure, we get the downside of this too: cranks, frauds, used-car-salesmen, agile coaches, wannabes, fads, marketing, etc.

But they don't stop me learning for my own ends, and if i ignore them they have no effect on what I can learn for myself once I pass the relatively low barrier of stable employment and income and basic hardware. And my knowledge makes me more employable and more attractive.

Whereas there is no way I can participate or do the same with engineering, medicine, or law etc without effectively cancelling my life and/or desires in other fields.

And whereas my knowledge and self-direction make me immediately more employable and desirable NOW and at all times in the future in programming, i have huge sunk, upfront, and opportunity costs for several years to participate formally in each of those other fields.

[laythea]

Yep. Except I would consider what I do as mostly engineering, and what I said above still applies. Subsea oil/gas control systems, gas turbine control systems, etc, but then sometime just desktop applications, eg OpenGL/Java etc. All need software. But all engineering, although I would say the desktop application contracts are less engineering, more programming. But then we would have to start talking about the whether programming is actually engineering so don't want to go there :)

[terminalcommand]

I am about to graduate from law school. I also agree that a law degree "hardly scratches the surface" of law.

That's why in most countries lawyer candidates are required to do mandatory legal internships. And even after becoming a lawyer, you need to gain a lot of experience before you can be trusted to practice law without the supervision of an experienced lawyer.

[regulation_d]

One of my law professors speculated that you learn about 3% of what you need to be a lawyer in law school. At the time, I thought that was a bit conservative. In hindsight, it seems pretty fair.

[zozin]

Do you have a throwaway email? I'd like to ask you a few questions about transitioning from law to programming. Thanks.

[giobox]

Afraid I don't really have much to say about this - I did a postgrad Computer Science Masters, applied for Software Engineer jobs and started new career immediately following completion of Masters. I've known several law graduates follow this path. If like me you've always had an interest in the field and were a reasonably competent programmer before starting the CS degree this wasn't all that difficult by comparison - I found attaining the CS Masters easier than studying Law if I'm honest.

[tostitos1979]

CS PhD here and worked over a decade. Yesterday, I made a list of over a dozen technical areas in CS I feel inadequate on. I think the issue is not that a CS Masters is easy. It is that CS knowledge is a never ending firehose. When I graduated (2008), most NoSQL systems were not even created. For anyone transitioning from law/medicine to CS, while I welcome you to the field (good for you!! tech is awesome), just be aware that tech gets obsolete very fast. While an older lawyer or doctor may be considered experienced, the newbies right out of school may run laps around you (lots of examples but the creator of Ethereum comes to mind. I know oh so many PhDs who work on distributed systems but it took a Waterloo undergrad student to think out of the box).

[DubiousPusher]

Yeah if we're talking about barrier to entry, I can't think of one much greater than the LSAT.

[sethrin]

That's an interesting idea. What would you say makes the LSAT difficult?

[pathseeker]

>furthermore I'd argue it's pretty insulting to insinuate that Computer Science is somehow more difficult in this regard

Why in the world would that be insulting and who is it insulting to? If anything it's a reflection of how immature the industry is and how computer science degrees have minute overlap with software engineering.

[dsacco]

> Why in the world would that be insulting and who is it insulting to?

It’s insulting to diminish the legitimate achievements of other people through unjustified comparison, in particular when doing so results in the elevation of the person doing it.

There is no objective criteria by which we can state computer science is a more difficult field than law or medicine. To imply that is therefore offensive, and people are not “immature” just because they react to offensive things by being insulted, even if you believe they shouldn’t feel insulted.

[infinite8s]

It's insulting to all the people who are doctors/lawyers/any number of other fields where the degree is just the entry point to being able to work in it.

[maxander]

> Programmers have to remember a vast amount of domain knowledge. Consider the basic task of choosing where you are going to store some data, well first you need to know which options exist and there's dozens of them (do you want Postgres, SQLite, Redis, LevelDB, ..?). Then you need to know the strengths and weaknesses of each. And I hope you have been keeping your knowledge up-to-date because the answer in 2018 is very different to the answer in 2008.

I'm pretty sure 90% of us would just look for a Stack Exchange question describing a bunch of popular database platforms and choose whichever looked best after thinking about it for a few minutes, and that outside of extreme circumstances (>terabytes of data, distributed over an actually unreliable network, other exotica) almost any option would work well enough.

Which is to say, programming is complicated but it's not very precise. Compare to mechanical engineering, where if you use the wrong steel your bridge will fall down; or to medicine, where if you prescribe the wrong drug someone might just die. So while there's lots that's useful for a programmer to know, if they don't know it they can get by alright almost all the time, and it's really hard for their managers to tell the difference. (Which is also why we can get away with not having a "programming school" beyond a handful of required courses for a CS degree.) So it's hard for this to seem like a very effective barrier to entry.

[fnord123]

> Compare to mechanical engineering, where if you use the wrong steel your bridge will fall down; or to medicine, where if you prescribe the wrong drug someone might just die.

Dereference the wrong pointer and the rocket blows up. Forget a memory barrier and the robot brain gets corrupted memory and sees human life as an impediment to paper clip maximization. Forget to zero out some memory in a goto: cleanup section and suddenly there's a back door in a popular security library leaving machines to the whim of any curious script kiddie.

I know a lot of people aren't working on real time systems or encryption libraries that have the same level of significant consequences as what you're describing, but some are.

[empthought]

For software developers (and in fact, for the general public), the smart play is to rely on real engineers to provide mechanical, electric, or electronic failsafes in their designs.

[mcguire]

That seems to have worked well for Intel.

[jpindar]

Nowadays the electronics has code in it.

[woolvalley]

And most mechanical engineers are not necessarily making bridges, they are making adhoc small objects.

[13of40]

> I'm pretty sure 90% of us would just look for a Stack Exchange question

When you're starting from scratch, I think the bigger barrier isn't "where do I store this data", it's "what the hell is data"? Try to explain to a computer illiterate person that the latest Mariah Carey CD is just a really big number and you'll get a glimpse of this. The person who knows they can jump on Stack Exchange is already past the worst part of the learning curve.

[mooreds]

> When you're starting from scratch

And other times. I've been working in software for almost two decades. I ran into a particular data problem that I could describe but didn't know the name of (a la wizard of earthsea). So I couldn't search to see how others had tackled this.

Google and blogs and YouTube and stackoverflow have pushed the boundaries of knowledge. You don't need to know exactly how to do something (for many kinds of tasks) but you do need to know what it is called, and how to adapt what you find on the net to your situation.

[tracker1]

You haven't seen some of the really generalized questions that come up on stack exchange then. ;-)

That said, it's often a great resource.

[TheHegemon]

> I'm pretty sure 90% of us would just look for a Stack Exchange question describing a bunch of popular database platforms and choose whichever looked best after thinking about it for a few minutes, and that outside of extreme circumstances (>terabytes of data, distributed over an actually unreliable network, other exotica) almost any option would work well enough.

And you're the reason why I have to mop up poor performance because someone decided to use MongoDB for highly-relational data.

[maxander]

Oh, yes[1]. I was arguing why there isn't a knowledge barrier to entry into programming, not why there shouldn't be one. :)

[1] Well, not me in particular! I know the important things and only use SE for looking up trivial details, of course. But maybe not everyone agrees with me which is which...

[dredmorbius]

I'd argue the reverse: that in software, very small errors can have vast consequences, but it's virtually impossible in many cases to tell what those consequences may be or where they'll fall.

The reason is that software systems are at another level of complexity.

The Space Shuttle is often given as an example of the most complex machine every built, with more than 2.5 million parts. The Airbus A380 has about 4 million parts.

https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-most-complex-machine-ever-bu...

The Linux Kernel, not necessarily the most complex software ever written, has nearly 10 million lines of executable code, over 12 million with comments, scattered over 36,000+ files.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-lines-of-code-are-in-the-Linu...

Google's back-end cluster and services are frequently given as the most complex software existing.

The full LoC in Debian GNU/Linux has been estimated as 324 million as of 2009. This is the stable archive, which includes somewhere between about 30k to 70k individual software packages (I'd have to do some digging to see what the count was for the stable release as of 2009).

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/111281/exploding-am...

[crdoconnor]

>I'm pretty sure 90% of us would just look for a Stack Exchange question describing a bunch of popular database platforms and choose whichever looked best after thinking about it for a few minutes

I used to do that but I got burned more than a few times.

These days I do a bunch of research - sometimes days, including tracking down obscure blog posts about obscure issues, reading issue trackers and spiking code. Can feel like a waste to begin with but it's saved me from some very dark places.

I would not trust stack exchange or stack overflow for a technology recommendation ever.

[wetpaws]

I don't think the problem with programming is that it is complex or has wast domain knowledge, it is true, but this is not a unique problem.

I think the biggest barrier in programming is just how abstract and alien it is, cognitive load can be enormous. Try to teach engineer about materials or steel liquation or semiconductors - it might be abstract or complex but at least it is dealing with real life physical processes.

With programming it is whole different galaxy. Like explaining pointer arithmetic to someone who just started learning CS. Or recursion, or asking someone to rotate tree in their head - there is a huge chance it will simply BSOD them. Programming is much more close to theoretical physics or maths than engineering.

[cdaringe]

It's a good thought, but I agree with madengr. Other disciplines are faced with abstract challenges, and even those in plain sight are very difficult to reason about. Magnetic fields. Rotational moment of inertia. RMoI--still so confusing. Even simple to explain, easy to observe concepts can still be abstract and difficult to understand.

[madengr]

Have you taken a course in semiconductors? Just as much abstraction there, and EE in general, as CS.

[petercooper]

Programmers have to remember a vast amount of domain knowledge.

It's even more elementary than that, I think. I've encountered lots of intelligent people who lack any sort of diagnostics skills - absolutely essential for being a programmer.

Things like.. the landline is broken. Well, then, get another phone, plug it in and see if it works. If it does, then it's the phone we need to look at, if it doesn't, we need to move further up the line.

It frequently boggles my mind how many people struggle with simple elimination, experimentation, and narrowing down to resolve problems, and I'm not sure such people could become developers without this ability.

[petra]

That's learnable. For example, military forces teach enlisted people with varying levels of skills how diagnose systems, and it works.

[laythea]

I disagree. It may be possible to teach a monkey to perform X. But can you teach a monkey to teach another monkey to perform X? EDIT: no implied insult there.

[rmah]

You can disagree but you would be wrong. I have personally taught people to diagnose and repair systems. Many others have as well.

There are are also formalized methods of teaching how diagnostics. And training on how to teach it. So yes, you can teach a monkey how to teach another monkey to do X.

[laythea]

Not if X is problem solving, which is what I was getting at really. For example, you could teach a monkey to teach X to another monkey, but what if the other monkey did not consume the learned material. Then the teacher monkey would not be able to adapt to still achieve the goal of teaching the student monkey. What you say works, assuming what is being taught is simple, and there is no feedback from the monkey that is being taught to teacher monkey.

That feedback loop from student to teacher, is similar to a problem that you tried to fix, and it still doesn't work. You then need to adapt, just as the teacher monkey would need to when the student monkey did not understand what was being taught. How you adapt to the input from that feedback can not be taught, because the particular feedback that one will receive in the future cannot be predicated (for complex troubleshooting etc).

Sorry for bad monkey examples. :)

[laythea]

This is so true. In my job, it's the problem solving ability that is valued. Not the innate knowledge of tools etc that we use to solve the problems, however that is, off course, required also.

[fuggedaboudit]

I have an issue with that: law school and medical school certainly do not teach you how to practice law or medicine. Computer science sounds akin to both: you get theoretical underpinnings (many of which are outdated or will be unneeded for your specialty) but all your actual learning is on the job.

[zebraflask]

Agreed. I've done both law and programming. Law school categorically does not even try to teach aspiring lawyers how to practice. The classic curriculum is designed to teach you how to "think like a lawyer." There are exceptions here and there, but if you want practical skills, you have to deliberately look for the handful of seminars and clinics that teach them.

Between learning to program and learning to practice law, once you get past your chosen programming language's syntax and a few core CS concepts - learning to program is much easier.

[ithkuil]

Learning how to do X can be very easy if you accept an arbitrary level of competence as enough to claim "I know how to X".

I have the feeling that a lot of people can believe they have learned to program while all what they did is to go past their chosen programming language syntax and grasped a few core CS concepts.

That's quite a low barrier to entry, but if that's what people mean when they hear the word "programming", then I'd argue that Software Engineering would be a better name for the field we're here comparing with practising law.

[zebraflask]

Don't let the electrical and hardware engineers hear you say that, that'll just open the old debate about whether software engineering is really engineering at all. (Kidding.)

[zelos]

In the UK the practical skills are taught postgraduate in a Legal Practice Course.

[cryptonector]

To become a good programmer you need either a gift (which some young people have) or experience -- lots of experience. A CS education gives you a good foundation, but you still need to learn so much more: software engineering practices, lots and lots of details, a variety of programming languages and their huge libraries, mistakes mistakes mistakes (so you can learn the patterns, so you can spot them in code reviews, so you can avoid making them again, ...), full-stack-ness (so you can scale, so you can foresee problems before they strike), ...

[namelost]

To be honest I'm not really sure how it works in the US, but in the UK if a doctor has passed their exams to become a registrar, they are by that time reasonably competent to practice their chosen speciality (except for surgeons). Obviously being a doctor requires a lot of practical on-the-job training but the point is the whole process is managed top-down.

Programming education is totally ad-hoc and you can be a great programmer even with a degree in agriculture.

[throwawayjava]

> Consider the basic task of choosing where you are going to store some data

Yes, do consider.

In many, many cases the appropriate answer is "whatever stack you're familiar with".

In maybe 10% of cases the answer will boil down to technical requirements and you'll need familiarity with "Postgres, SQLite, Redis, LevelDB, ..."

And that's where the bimodal distribution comes from.

> There are "law schools" and "med schools" to teach you all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor. There is no "programming school", every programmer is self-taught

I don't know a lot about the law.

But if you think that MDs are not "self-taught" in the same way bootcamp graduates or CS graduates are "self-taught", you should talk to an MD some time.

[foamflower]

> If you want to know just how hard programming is, try teaching it to someone.

> The lack of barriers to entry actually makes it harder. There are "law schools" and "med schools" to teach you all the knowledge required to become a lawyer or a doctor. There is no "programming school", every programmer is self-taught. A computer science degree hardly scratches the surface.

+1024

I have said quite a few times that the best CS program is one where you learn how to learn without being spoon fed. In fact, I know a couple great programmers who were _not_ CS (one studied econ; the other, physics), and they similarly learned how to learn without being spoon fed.

[jdmichal]

Yep. I've talked before that we are doing a huge disservice by not focusing on the sequential logic of programming, which is the first barrier to overcome. Also, we reinforce memorization over problem solving in maths throughout school. Hearing students say, "When are we ever going to use this?", was not uncommon when I was in school 15+ years ago. And as far as I can tell, the push for standardized curriculum and testing has only made this worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15164948#15168430

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12589473#12592521

[vkou]

I've been teaching my partner bits and pieces of programming. Sequential logic, and control flow were some one of the easier topics.

[andrei_says_]

I call this the essential learning skill and am totally bummed that our public education not only does not cultivate it but actively deters it.

[austenallred]

I run a Computer Science academy, and that’s quite literally our goal.

[mancerayder]

Which is why I question the usefulness of a computer science program/degree for the vast majority of dev positions. Learning how to learn would I imagine be the best use of such a degree; but then one with at least half a brain, given a few years in the field, starts to pick that up independently.

I chose to avoid computer science degrees because in those days, in the late 90's, it was pretty much 80-90% math classes. I don't regret getting a degree in a totally different discipline: it turns out learning philosophy, history, linguistics, writing, etc. etc. was far useful to me as a person (and, arguably, a worker) than some boring math classes ever would have been.

Have comp sci curriculums improved in that time? Given that job interviews these days last 4-8 hours, require group approval and whiteboarding in front of an audience, I would argue, NO. Obviously, no one trusts the degree.

[mr_toad]

The number of hours of hands-on programming in a degree (probably only a couple of hundred a year) are too few for a graduate to learn anything but the basics.

Most professional programmers would put in more hours of hands on programming in a months work.

[S_A_P]

The funny thing to me is that you implicitly mention something else in this point. The languages/databases you specify are all popular in web/mobile/end user based applications, and almost exclusively never used in enterprise where C#/java/Sql/Oracle still make the vast majority of tech stacks.

You could add another layer to what you are saying as do you want to build apps? platforms? or enterprise line of business software? if so you need to know entirely different stacks. Then you need to know what is important to being "good" at the chosen stack.

This is just a long winded way of agreeing with you, there are vast amounts of knowledge required to "make it". Most importantly you cant ever feel like you know enough and stop trying to learn. I took about 12 months off from stretching myself and now I feel 3 years behind...

[dsacco]

> If you want to know just how hard programming is, try teaching it to someone.

Continuing with the example from the article: law and medicine are also hard. Try teaching those to the same set of people.

> Programmers have to remember a vast amount of domain knowledge.

Programmers are not at all unique in their need to understand significant domain knowledge. Essentially every knowledge-based field, including those with licensing barriers to entry, also have this requirement (and arguably to a greater extent).

> And I hope you have been keeping your knowledge up-to-date because the answer in 2018 is very different to the answer in 2008.

Lawyers and doctors must also keep current with their field and the industry in general. If anything, the degree to which they must keep up with their respective fields seems to be a difference of degree when compared to software developers, not of category.

I don’t think any of this difficulty is the reason why programming enjoys high salaries, because (circling back to the article’s thesis), it isn’t distinct from other fields with higher barriers to entry in that respect.

[sheepmullet]

> law and medicine

Law and medicine also trend towards bimodal compensation.

There is an enourmous earnings difference between the top echelon of lawyers and all the other lawyers.

Same thing for specialist surgeons.

[majormajor]

> Programmers have to remember a vast amount of domain knowledge. Consider the basic task of choosing where you are going to store some data, well first you need to know which options exist and there's dozens of them (do you want Postgres, SQLite, Redis, LevelDB, ..?). Then you need to know the strengths and weaknesses of each. And I hope you have been keeping your knowledge up-to-date because the answer in 2018 is very different to the answer in 2008.

And yet there are a lot of examples of companies that got it wrong, picked objectively-shitty options, and still succeeded massively and then had the money to pour into cleaning up the resulting messes.

There's countless options, but they don't seem to matter as much as people believe. As much as it would be nice to think Lisp is a superweapon and it's easy to replicate Paul Graham's stories, that's not what's happening in the market.

There's an interesting split the OP discusses that seems to largely be a B2C vs B2B thing. With a few exceptions at the high end, many of the winners in both of these spaces aren't determined by "purely better technology" but by other things. However, in the B2B space, battles can be won much more easily on the strength of salespeople and business strategy, whereas in the consumer space, it requires more skilled implementation of ideas - great UX doesn't require technically great programming, but it requires competent execution of the original idea, in a way that a medical records system sold to a hospital administration board doesn't.

[sheepmullet]

> and still succeeded massively and then had the money to pour into cleaning up the resulting messes.

And they typically have to pay enormous sums of money to hire the talent required to clean up.

This is large part helps create the bimodal compensation model.

[heedlessly2]

if you want to create a CRUD app, then you probably don't need the best and latest library.

There are plenty of apps out there today which support millions of users but didn't choose the most optimal database, wasn't well architected, and has mountains of sloppy technical debt.

[saas_co_de]

> Programmers have to remember a vast amount of domain knowledge

And that is only half the job. You also have to practice, a lot.

I think "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" is about right http://norvig.com/21-days.html

You can learn academic computer science, or know a lot of trivia about programming and computers, but without years of dedicated practice it doesn't translate into actual productivity.