Classical programmer fallacy: equating cleverness with value.
There are plenty of level 3 cheesy little Access and VB apps that any "serious" programmer would laugh that that are level 5 or 9 on your scale.
That's true. This should have two axes (at least). One with "domain specific knowledge" and other one with "programming expertise".
Indeed, when domain experts reach some arbitrary level of programming expertise, many good things may happen.
Re:Please don't learn to code
by wildmXranat on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @08:53AM
(#3976296)
My first job in this field, without exaggeration: Oh, you can perform skills 1-4, great, welcome to the team and since you're a junior we can give you 35K a year. Sweet. First task, you'll need to level-up to about 8-9 as we need you to architect a Linux application server with a user panel for: hardware monitoring, firewall, application mgmt, network mgmt, license mgmt, application code obfuscation, etc.
If you're going to get to Level 6, I'd prefer you just stop at Level 5.
If you get to Levels 7,8, or 9, thank you.