But do you go to the brain surgeon when you need a band-aide? How often do you visit the brain surgeon?
My point is most programmers are arrogant douches who think that their todo app is the equivalent of brain surgery.
And the people coding robots to do surgery couldn't do it without actual surgeons telling them how to do it.
And I can almost guarantee you that those programmers are getting paid hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars and are not the ones who are getting screwed by their employers.
You keep touting brain surgery as if it's the yard stick by which all other endeavors (including pure mathematics and astrophysics) should be measured for difficulty and cognitive ability required--it isn't. The brain may be immensely complex, but neuroanatomy at the macroscopic scale isn't and has fewer inter-connected components than a large software project.
The only reason you think brain surgery is so complicated is, again, because doctors have excellent PR.
"well it's not brain surgery" is an American expression.
And you're kind of proving my point about the arrogance of programmers.
I'm sure you'll fix your moms computer before you let just anybody do brain surgery on her. A large project may have many interconnected components, but it's not the only profession that involves such things and the way the human brain works means that given enough time you'll probably be able to understand whatever systems you would like to. I mean, what it basically comes down to is understanding a few programming languages and logic. Maybe chemistry would be a better comparison? I wouldn't say IQ matters as much as dedication.
Bill Joy wasn't at the forefront of computer science at the dawn of the computer age because he was a super genius, he had just logged more than 10,000 hours of programming by that time.
Unfortunately for us programmers we're soon going to find our salaries going down simply because there are inevitably going to be more and more tech savvy people and programmers. It's not a new thing anymore. ANYONE can do it. Literally. Only about 1% of programming being done right now is highly advanced and complicated. The good programmers will continue to create easy to understand abstracts for the not so good programmers until we can ask watson to code what we need on the spot.
I'm not sure anyone can do it, sure on a global scale it might seem that way, but the same goes for any other profession. If you hang around in a non tech city you'll see that there are actually a very small amount of competent programmers.
And with most software projects, much like real world engineering, it's less about the fundamentals (language, base logic, etc...) and more about managing and working with highly complex systems.
But do you go to the brain surgeon when you need a band-aide? How often do you visit the brain surgeon?
My point is most programmers are arrogant douches who think that their todo app is the equivalent of brain surgery.
And the people coding robots to do surgery couldn't do it without actual surgeons telling them how to do it.
And I can almost guarantee you that those programmers are getting paid hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars and are not the ones who are getting screwed by their employers.