[CM30]

Nah, I don't think so. Software engineering has always been a field where the barrier to entry is quite low, and where a lot of people didn't need a CS background to get started there. And for many of them, they still don't. Web development for instance requires more knowledge of how browsers work rather than the computers they run on.

Even so, the number of mediocre/terrible software engineers and web developers doesn't seem to have changed much overall. We all know of old school desktop software that was incredibly poorly written. We all know examples of games which were incredibly poorly written. There have been badly coded, badly designed websites from people with little experience in the field since the web first became a thing.

Plus people joined because it paid decently back then too. The dotcom boom brought in a lot of people who only cared about the wage slip at the end of each month. The early days of gaming had tons of people jumping on the hype train for money, whether it was the home computer scene in the 80s in the UK or the early console gaming one when Atari was still a big player. Or perhaps for every generation since.

As for whether they'll stick around if it crashes? It depends. It may very well not crash at all. And while a certain percentage will leave if it does, others will stick around and learn more instead.

So no, I don't think the quality has gone down. There have always been people from informal backgrounds, a knowledge of CS hasn't ever been necessary or mainstream overall, and mediocre to terrible programmers and developers have been a thing since the field began.