I disagree, though I used to believe the same.

What you're discounting is that people are born with vastly different mental capabilities - I'm quite certain everyone on HN is at least in the top 20% of the country, and it's easy for us to assume that, just because we've encountered few hard caps on our mental abilities, that others are the same.

What changed my mind was working in a factory - where I had months to hang out with line workers, machinists, technicians, and just shoot the shit with them. My takeaway from it is: a lot of them simply do not have the intelligence to operate in many highly technical jobs. This isn't a slight on them - they're amazing, worthwhile human beings, but it's unreasonable to expect them to be able to write code, even given an arbitrarily large amount of training. For every IQ 120, there is an IQ 80. Remember that.

The other side of it is that our school system performs appallingly poorly, and fails a lot of the population. Even if someone had the natural intelligence and aptitude, for a lot of them their educational background is so poor that there is no meaningful way for them to catch up, ever. A person of solid intellect who, for whatever reasons, barely made his way out of high school math, is not going to be able to pick up a CS curriculum. The foundation we're working from is not very solid.

The third component is of course the system - if someone wanted to retrain as a professional programmer from a factory job, and let's assume magically that he/she has the intelligence to do it, and unexpectedly did really well in school a long time ago. They're about as ideally positioned as one can be... except who's going to pay for the retraining? Who's going to hire the 40 year-old who just got into programming? Even when you have created the ideal state, the person's odds are still horrible.

You're probably right on a lot of this. But being a programmer doesn't require exceptional intelligence. Normal intelligence, yes. And a fair amount of patience. An ability to not get frustrated, to understand that things NOT working right away is normal. But it's not that hard. And you don't need to go through a formal CS curriculum to be a productive programmer. I don't think it's a cakewalk; I certainly know 50-somthings who I don't think could do it. Not a chance in fact. But I do think it's possible for some.

I wonder what we're all going to do when humans doing app development by writing code becomes obsolete. Yes, it will happen.

There are a lot of people of below-normal intelligence out there. Keep in mind that by definition 50% of the world has an IQ below 100 - that's a very, very large chunk of our work force that simply cannot pull off, say, programming, data science, or the myriad of technical jobs that are now in-demand.

> "But it's not that hard."

It wasn't for you, evidently, and it wasn't really for me either, but for a lot of people it strains at the edge of their ability to comprehend and mentally model, even with practice. That's the point I'm making: we've been born into the portion of the population that can, with some elbow grease, grok it. Not everyone is as fortunate. Even some of the ones who are, lack the educational background - in math, in logic, in whatever - to make that leap.

It took working a wildly different job, with a wildly different demographic, to really comprehend just how wide that gap is.

Even if we could successfully retrain, say, 20% of the industrial work force into knowledge-based jobs, that's still a lot of people out in the cold, and even then - who would pay for the retraining, which for a lot of people would take years? Who will bankroll their education, or even their living costs, while this transition occurs?

There are so many systemic problems with this it's mind-boggling. Suffice it to say, the notion that displaced workers from now-collapsed industries can retrain and reapply elsewhere is dramatically oversimplified. The reality is that the vast majority will never make the leap anywhere else.