I've read a lot that leads me to believe the average professional programmer is borderline incompetent.
Programming as a field exhibits a weird bimodal distribution of talent. Some people are just in it for the paycheck, but others think of it as a true intellectual and creative challenge. Not only does the latter group spend extra hours perfecting their art, they also tend to be higher-IQ. Most of them could make better money in the law/medicine/MBA path. So obviously the "programming is an art" group is going to have a low opinion of the "programming is a paycheck" group.
In addition to this, if you're a good bricklayer, you might do, at most, twice the work of a bad bricklayer. It's quite common for an excellent programmer (a hacker) to do more work than ten average programmers--and that's conservative. The difference is more apparent. My guess might be that you hear this complaint from good programmers, Barry?
Although, I can guarantee that everyone I've met can do at least FizzBuzz. We have average programmers, not downright bad ones.
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July Part 1