[starsixtynine]

This is simply what happens when you pay people with very little knowledge large amounts of money to do something that requires expertise. I'm not sure why we're pussyfooting around that.

It would be like not knowing about loops or how to print text to the screen or how to do I/O. People seem to think you can be clueless and somehow still deserve a programmer's salary. The entitlement baffles me (and I've experienced a lot of it from people throughout my career).

A staff SWE who can't send you a patch is simply unworthy of their title, the way I'm unworthy of the title "pilot" or "doctor" or "attorney".

[fragmede]

I wouldn't trust the world's leading neurosurgeon to perform surgery on my ankle. Nor would I want my patent attorney to represent me on a murder charge. I'm also not trusting the pilot for the Marine One helicopter to fly me anywhere on a Boeing 737 Max. "SWE" is simply too broad a term to encompass all of the deep knowledge someone should have at some point in their career. That us, unless we want to talk about licensing software developers with certifications, which is a whole other can of worms.