[yodsanklai]

To play devil's advocate 1. Not all CS projects are equally hard. Many successful projects have been written by kids with no formal education. In the same way that some great music have been written by beginners. 2. Some people learn coding at 7, have a formal education up to a PhD and they aren't better engineers than others with only 3-4 years education. A reason is that a lot of time may be spent on things irrelevant for the job.

But then I agree that nowadays a few years education seems like a minimum.

[namaria]

There was a lot of low hanging fruit in the mid 2000s, when Ruby and Python made creating relatively complex software easier. Now most obvious app markets (hotel/travel booking, social media, ordering food, dating, ride hailing/sharing) and everything web is three layers of framework tweaking. I think clueless 'coders' had a window in time where they could actually produce a lot of economic value but now they're producing more harm then good. A lot of people come out of bootcamps now thinking 'programming = editing high level languages in a text box' and don't have the depth of knowledge to design and run sane production environments.

[farmin]

This was true for me. I made ok money off a simple web service I created in 2013 with no formal education. But I think it still exists to a lesser degree now, probably only if you have some other domain specific specialisation though, contacts etc. e.g I am a farmer than knows how to code a little which is fun.