None of my friends have the whuffie to get anyone else a job like that. So I had to get the paid-for credentials just to get my foot in the door. I could not

None of my friends have the whuffie to get anyone else a job like that. So I had to get the paid-for credentials just to get my foot in the door. I could not now get anyone else a job, nor can any of my current or former technical-side co-workers. My career is owned and operated by the good ol'boy network of a completely foreign caste. So you can't "just get a job" in this field. I don't know if you have noticed, but HN regularly features articles and blog posts about how incredibly broken tech hiring is these days. All those people pushing young folks into learning how to code see it as the long-term solution to their perceived problem of not being able to find affordable skilled labor for their businesses. But the supply of skilled labor is not the problem. The problem is that the businesses are not only failing to look for it in the seemingly obvious places, but it is very likely they would not recognize it if they were literally handcuffed to a qualified applicant for a solid fortnight, in a survival challenge designed specifically to favor analytical personalities. Rather than fixing the system to identify and match labor to business, they want to rearrange the entire world such that picking a random person off the street to do the job won't be a complete failure. They want everyone to learn how to code so they won't have to worry so much about their woeful inability to discern if someone is truly well suited for their open position or not.