Are you sure that experience can be extrapolated to the labor market as a whole? I get the feeling that the difference in capabilities from one individual to an

Are you sure that experience can be extrapolated to the labor market as a whole? I get the feeling that the difference in capabilities from one individual to another is much more pronounced in software development relative to many other fields. It's a testament to how hard software development is. While this idea might not work for something like software startups (or anything that requires extremely skilled labor, like medicine), I don't see why those criticisms would apply to fields that don't take a decade to perfect. Also, I think it would be difficult to confidently infer that the unemployed tend to be the lowest quality workers. That might be true outside of recessions, but during a time of 10% unemployment, (and much higher if you look beyond the bullshit U-3 indicator) a lot of those people were just at the wrong place at the wrong time, or had jobs in shrinking industries.