>The only thing I've never done is masonry, but I'm told it's not too tough. My wife paid a contractor to show her how to cap a foundation. He spent two hours

>The only thing I've never done is masonry, but I'm told it's not too tough. My wife paid a contractor to show her how to cap a foundation. He spent two hours with her, and we saved $50k+ by doing the rest of it ourselves. So no, not too hard. We don't have enough of the rest of the skills you enumerate to think I could build an entire house to code, but your analysis is spot on. As a game developer/embedded systems engineer, I also agree that there are tiers of development complexity. Even within these fields there are clear levels ability. Some of the stuff I do on a daily basis is well beyond the typical HTML/JavaScript/PHP developer -- I spent years learning to be a good low-level developer and honing my skills, not just a few hours. And I've directly observed people who were plenty self-motivated who run into an "abstraction wall" that they can't get past; I've even spent hours with some people trying to come up with ways to help them understand, even though no one ever did that for me. From the other side it's extremely clear that there are tiers of developer skill levels, and that even the bottom tier is out of reach to much of the population. >It's not popular to say because we like to think everyone's a special snowflake with some predetermined number of "ability points," just allocated differently, but the bell curve is real and some people just can't do what we do. I think the difference on "ability points" is that, by spending concentrated time on learning, you can actually earn extra ability points. Just like there aren't "muscle points" that are distributed differently between people: You exercise your muscles and they get stronger. "The brain is a muscle" isn't entirely a bogus concept.