> I find that there's a borderline self-contradictory aspect of hacker culture. While we romanticize the concept of the 10x programmer, which is an individual of genius, our culture also stresses the concept of autodidacticism. Teach yourself to code. Just use MOOCs. Build it yourself. Hack on an open source project. So there's this tension between valorizing the inborn superhuman and the belief that it's possible to reach greatness- though perhaps not 10x greatness- by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
Those seem like orthogonal aspects. If we stressed the idea that you had to do (say) a 4-year degree at a great university, or something akin to the bar exam, would that be any more compatible with the idea that some people are 10x better than others? If anything I'd say the opposite: we'd expect most of the Harvard graduating class to be on roughly the same level, it seems a lot less wild that some self-taught people could be 10x better than others.
> So all of this, buttressed by real world labor demands, create incentives for people to try to become programmers. Even those who aren't "cut out to be programmers." Our increasingly cutthroat and unequal society also incentivizes people shifting to programming as a safe career choice. "Learn to code."
This happens in every field though? You get people who are desperate to become a doctor and apply to med school year after year, despite being completely unsuited to it. You get people who insist they're gonna make it as an actor/musician/comedian and spend decades working crappy day jobs so they can live where the action is, when really they'd be better advised to pick a career they're good at.
> I don't know how we can stop "pretending otherwise." Tech companies continue to complain about the engineering talent shortage. Bootcamps and online courses continue to promise people that they can become that talent. There aren't any agreed-upon industry standards by which to exclude people who truly aren't fit for it. FAAMG has infinite money and power in the industry to continue their entrenched practices. Most startups cargo cult the leading megacorps' processes. So instead, candidates are encouraged to continue grinding Leetcode and apply, apply again.
Well, if we told people outright that programming is a matter of IQ, and gave an actual IQ test rather than an IQ-like test in interviews, that might help some people realise it's not for them. You're right that what catches on in the industry is largely a function of what the most successful companies pick, but ultimately that list of top companies is not static and we'd hope that companies with better hiring practices will (eventually) rise to the top.