I hate to do this, but: Stop equating programming and bus drivers or waiters. They aren't equal. Programming is difficult in its depth and breadth in a way tha

I hate to do this, but: Stop equating programming and bus drivers or waiters. They aren't equal. Programming is difficult in its depth and breadth in a way that waiting tables is not. Stop treating all programming tasks as equal. They are not. Most of the easy ones are only easy because they run on top of all the difficult programs. That is the goal of the difficult programs, to make it possible for laymen to do work that would require an expert for certain repetitive tasks if the underlying program did not exist. Most people would not be capable of getting Hello World to run without the OS and high-level abstractions that take expertise to develop. And making that possible requires many many experts in many different kinds of programming. Stepping off of the single thread and single machine model into concurrent and distributed computing to enable even more laymen to make stuff takes even more experts. There is a meme in the industry that people shouldn't strive for expertise. We still need more experts, and you become an expert through practice while still a layman. Nothing would be worse off if we had more experts capable of deciding when to use something extensible off of the shelf to enable laymen to do simple tasks, and when to build a platform to eventually enable that task to be done by a layman. A lot of things would be worse off if we encouraged all people to stop at the layman level. We should encourage everyone to at least become a layman for their own enrichment. But we should also encourage laymen to strive for expertise to lower the barriers to entry to produce more laymen capable of doing simple tasks.