[engfan]

The same thing that has happened forever. People practice and gain skills on their own time before being welcomed into the professional community. Skilled new college graduate programmers have often put in a decade or more of learning before they graduate because they start young. They may have taught themselves many programming languages, studied many open source libraries, learned about profiling and efficiency tradeoffs, etc. Companies with serious engineering needs simply don’t want and haven’t wanted those who lack this natural desire to build and iterate. The only change is that the bar continues to rise a bit and all people are now competing at one level or another with machines.