Exactly. IT is the far west. There are few educational requirements, and hiring laws specific to our craft. It's a very young field, unlike medicine or archite

Exactly. IT is the far west. There are few educational requirements, and hiring laws specific to our craft. It's a very young field, unlike medicine or architecture, and we just beginning to establish professional standards on the job. The fact most people see it as magic and can't evaluate it at all doesn't help. Anecdotally, I've seen many programmers that can't code. Remember that 2 dev projects out of 3 fail, for a clusters of reasons. And when it doesn't, there is sometimes a few hard kernel of devs that are doing most of the important part of the job, fixing other's mess on the fly, or just plainly doing it for them. So those bad programmers can go from failure to failure, and never be blamed for it. But honestly, it it weren't that way, I couldn't have entered the field. I've been given my chance more than once, and I've screwed up many times, before even becoming a decent professional.