How many companies need "basic code"? Many need much more than that. Your phrasing makes it seem like advancing beyond that point is just as easy, but it's not.

What happens when you need to debug, and you don't understand anything because you copy-pasted from a tutorial? How long would an employer be willing to wait while you google for the right tutorial telling you how to fix the problem?

Have you ever looked into how many businesses do nothing but set up WordPress sites for customers with light customization? Quite a lot of companies want such services.

"Writing code is not really hard" isn't the same thing. Maybe you can bang together such a site without really coding, as soon as you do, even simple PHP or HTML it gets harder. I'd also take "writing code" to mean writing code, not just a subsection of particularly easy code - you can't advertise as "software developer" in general if all you can do is wordpress.

You can't advertise as a "pastry chef" if you just know how to bake cupcakes either.

I'm not sure this is relevant to my point that coding isn't easy. I don't know anything about pastry-cheffing.

I think you're missing the point of my post -- I don't think writing code is easy.

I am not saying that pastry chefs and baristas are useless.

What I am saying is that, according to industry data, any random person can be trained to the degree of 'pastry chef' of 'barista' with something like several weeks of training.

And that is basically indistinguishable from 'no-skill worker'.

> You can spend 30 minutes watching youtube videos and learn how to write basic code. It won't be glorious but it will work.

Mmmmmmmaybe if you're writing boring CRUD (and any non-YouTube educated engineering would probably think of automating this). Fortunately there are much more interesting problems that can take an entire team of world-class engineers to solve, working gloriously or just barely.

Some code really is hard to write.