Is the madness ever going to end?

You have a misspelling in your second sentence.

You also seemed to be focused on only web development. I would argue that "IT people" are not limited to web development -- and that you're overlooking the entire maker movement (including Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos), the breathtaking development going on with self-driving cars, and the development still taking place with AI.

But as always -- follow the money. Old school engineering shops got their money from the military (the internet is thanks to DARPA, after all). Web 1.0 got it's money from selling physical goods. Web 2.0 got it's money from venture capital and digital goods. What are we selling now?

> In the past IT people, whether we're talking about programmers or something else, where very clever people. People with a high level of intelligence that took serious pride in doing things in a meaningful and pragmatic way.

Uh, no, IT people were idiots decades ago too. I was one of those idiots. I've watched myself become less of an idiot, over a very long period of time, because I can see my old self in other people today. But even that is a fallacy - I'm not actually less of an idiot, I just see my old idiocy and assume because I've seen it that I'm smarter now.

I find the "impostor syndrome" meme pretty funny. Tech people seem to get impostor syndrome when their egos develop a crack and they see their own lack of understanding, and worry somebody else will see it too. But then a tech person with a stronger ego convinces them that it's all fine, because actually we're all either idiots or geniuses and nobody can tell the difference.

The tech industry is basically at the same level of advancement as people who built small buildings in the medieval period. Large enough that you need an experienced craftsman to put it together, but small enough that they're not using geometry or doing the math necessary to safely build large structures. The idiocy will continue until society forces this industry to be a real regulated engineering discipline.

> and while we're add it

I hole-hardedly agree, but allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong. In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies...

> Programming is engineering

Is it?

Genuine question that I've been asking myself for the past several years: In what senses is software engineering actually an engineering discipline?

If you make a project trade-off for the sake of code maintainability, is that based on empirically tested knowledge or following a design pattern guided by an artisan's intuition about how code will be interpreted?

I believe we, as an industry, are driving towards frameworks that can be operated with story-like analogies describing what needs to be done with no technology knowledge at all. The core computer scientists creating such a framework create it with entry level non-developers as the "end-users" in mind. Such a framework is the holy grail of software development because it will enable any Joe with any software idea to hire anyones to make "their dream". The "no code" movement is an early manifestation of this trend. BTW, the VFX world is ahead in this tread, creating production frameworks requiring no 3D graphics technical knowledge at all...