[bdcravens]

There are many who built careers around being essentially software assembly liners. Glue together framework/library bits, following well-trod paths. Get really good at Googling and grabbing code from Stack Overflow when you have to go off the path or solve problems.

[trollbridge]

You just described essentially what those coding "boot camps" taught people to do. Something you can learn in 12 weeks always seemed to me to be a job at high risk of automation.

Unfortunately, many "computer science" curricula weren't much better, and so now we have hordes of unemployed people with a skillset about as relevant as being able to hand-assemble ZRA1 code.

[bdcravens]

Both boot camps and academia do a poor job of preparing developers for a real career, they just started at opposite ends of the problem and never provide enough depth to get to the good part in the middle.

(I'm a very biased self-taught developer from the late 1990s who just happened to hit the industry at the perfect time)