My only experience is talking to my friends who are either software engineers, or other STEM people, law people or people who study or have studied rather deman

My only experience is talking to my friends who are either software engineers, or other STEM people, law people or people who study or have studied rather demanding programmes like medicine. Think roughly the top 20% of the population in terms of academic achievement. In my opinion, most of them would be able to learn software development, with proper motivation - i.e. the raw problem solving potential is there, but it's not used often enough. Funnily enough, those people are exactly the group that doesn't need to pivot their careers. Even if you can't make a former manufacturing worker into a programmer, you can still try to have more programmers in the next generation. There's an interesting talk that you might be able to find[1] about abstract reasoning, and how people weren't able to do it just a couple hundred years ago - "what's the difference between a fish and a bird?": "you can eat the fish". No reason why the next generation couldn't be more suited to software engineering jobs than we are now. 1 - I vaguely remember it was something about an old survey of Russian far east villagers (who live(d) as they did hundreds of years ago, for all intents and purposes).