I would also say that the tech industry desperately needs a better understanding of what constitutes the professional practitioner skill set, and how to teach a

I would also say that the tech industry desperately needs a better understanding of what constitutes the professional practitioner skill set, and how to teach and measure it. Many or most of the individual contributing practitioners I've encountered in my varied career across companies big (Microsoft, Google) and small (startups early and mid-stage) consist of individual contributors who either fall up into management or otherwise happily and unwittingly peak out in their skill set. The typical "high-quality" Senior Engineer is "smart and get things done" (Junior) plus a little bit of experiential knowledge peppered in with cold hard years on the resume. But there's a craft and skill set to this work that takes (1) a very focussed (presently, self-) training effort and value system and (2) takes years to master, but where the payoff is enormous (i.e, where the 10x/Nx productivity gain is found.) That last statement is theory only inasmuch as it challenged by those that don't want to believe that they're far from (the, or their) peak; I know it to be true. As a hint to what that skill set is, it's fairly simple to talk about descriptively...the end result being building systems from composable, contract-based abstractions of course respecting and knowing the current available tools and how to wield them. The problem is able-to-describe and able-to-do are miles apart; it takes many, many years of conscious, directed effort to perfect the craft. The few people I encounter that have that ability had to care about it and muscle through it on their own. We need something closer to an organized pedagogy and training and measurement around this particular skillset to produce much more of it in the industry. The problem is that any given business rightly has no interest in the kind of long-term investment required. And, at large, academia for many reasons doesn't have the practitioner context/focus/awareness to deliver the skill set, either. There's a hole to fill here somewhere...