Your worldview seems incredibly harsh to me. You’re equating competence with excellence which maybe only 20% of people reach. So you’re calling 80% of software developers incompetent.

I've interacted with a lot of reasonably randomly selected companies after starting a consultancy last year, and honestly yes, 80% of software developers are incompetent.

It's honestly a stretch to say they're software developers as you're probably imagining, but if you walk into a random office, most people with that title won't use version control, won't ever ship, and are generally a bit concussed.

It can be hard to imagine because many times, when we find competent teams, many of the members have never directly experienced a truly average team, as the culture one acquires on those teams makes it hard to ever be accepted on a good team (frequently the weaker developers don't even understand there's anything lacking in their skillset).

I'm more sympathetic now than I was a year ago, but it's also pretty unacceptable when you remember they work at hospitals and the government!

I don’t think that’s harsh at all. With the low barrier to entry and the high potential earnings, a lot of people joined for the paycheck and are profoundly uninterested in digging deeper. If anything, it’s surprising there’s as much competence as there is.

Excellence is something quite different. I’ve been in the presence of excellence. Excellence makes everybody in the room act smarter and smooths the path to competence. It shows you the way and gives you new ways of understanding the world. It’s truly rare, not 20%, maybe 0.2%.