>Many people who do it don't do it well.

"Doing it well" is difficult to define because defining it depends too much on the context. Too many opinions on how you should use language feature/API/algorithm generally leads to never really knowing the right thing to do. Unless we're talking about a small percentage of the bell curve of skill, then of course many people don't do it well.

Many people on a lot of professions provably don't do it as well as the superstars in each field. Are University of Oregon law school grads as 'good' as Stanford law grads?

I know the bar is pretty high in terms of what is passable as a programmer that works actual gigs. It's higher than a lot of other professions, where credentials mean more than actual performance and you can fudge/bs your way out of many situations. So it's fine if someone wants to try more power to them. Anyone can potentially do it, but to do it at a commercial level you can't just pass yourself off you have to be relatively good at what you do... otherwise you won't get hired or get fired rather quickly.

Oh there are plenty of (usually large) companies that love to hire legions of mediocre (or worse) "programmers" to work on large projects.

How do I know this? I work in the defense industry. I've seen some things :'(

Yep. I've seen those things, too.

If I weren't politically libertarian already, they probably would have pushed me in that direction. Beware the military-industrial complex indeed.

Part of the reason why I support UBI is the number of people I already see receiving a basic+ income and benefits in exchange for doing a job that doesn't really have any rationally justifiable reason for existing.