> We complain about a shortage of competent people.
As an aside, software development is one of the most internally brutal and self-critical industries out there. We tend to consider anyone outside the top 20% to be entirely, unredeemably incompetent. It creates a huge drive in our industry to keep getting better, but I do wonder if the d* measuring contest might be holding us back at the same time. The ridiculously competitive nature of our field has already been attributed to unintended consequences like blocking out women and older people. I personally was drawn to the field due to its competitiveness, but I do wonder if sometimes we let "perfect" be the enemy of "good".
>We tend to consider anyone outside the top 20% to be entirely, unredeemably incompetent.
The trouble is, in software, single individuals in that top 20% are capable of doing things in a short time that individuals from the bottom 80% couldn't do in 1000 man years. Software is funny like that, some people can think different kinds of thoughts.
So in a way, for certain values of incompetent, this is actually true.
In which case, merely adding more software developers won't help the problem. You need to add more people of the quality of the current top 20%, thus expanding that to "top 30%", "top 40%", and eventually the actual majority, hopefully.
I'm not quite sure why I collected the downvotes, but you're spot on. For example, I'm short and relatively uncoordinated. I have a few chronic physical problems in addition to this that make me "unredeemably incompetent" at the sport of basketball. I could work my ass off for the rest of my life and still never come within shouting distance of Michael Jordan. I simply cannot perform at an NBA level no matter what I do.
If there were a shortage of talented basketball players, it wouldn't matter how many copies of myself you were able to get into basketball training programs, you'd never get an MJ. We need a better system to find MJ's of STEM and allow their talent to work for us.
As an aside, software development is one of the most internally brutal and self-critical industries out there. We tend to consider anyone outside the top 20% to be entirely, unredeemably incompetent. It creates a huge drive in our industry to keep getting better, but I do wonder if the d* measuring contest might be holding us back at the same time. The ridiculously competitive nature of our field has already been attributed to unintended consequences like blocking out women and older people. I personally was drawn to the field due to its competitiveness, but I do wonder if sometimes we let "perfect" be the enemy of "good".