> In football, there's only a market for the best. Nobody likes a loser.
Would totally disagree - given the number of football competitions [1], it is obvious that there's a market for anybody who wants to and can kick ball.
Same for software engineers - there are 23 millions of those in 2018 [2] and abundance of body shops, government jobs ("good enough for government work") and various engineering support functions says the opposite of what you're saying.