The hoops some members of this forum will jump through to convince themselves that building CRUD apps is some zenith of intellectual might just continues to astound me.
Maybe if jobs for all skill-sets were still growing (in availability and compensation) it'd be easier to write off a good portion of the population as mentally inferior, but now that knowledge jobs are gaining a monopoly on living wages/salaries I don't think it's as easy to be that glib.
We need to do better as a society.
We're not that glib when it comes to children and early education, and I don't think we should change attitude just because a person has reached adulthood. Laziness and/or the attribution fallacy seems to get the better of a lot of us on HN.
Presuming we want people to have good lives who aren’t able or inclined to do jobs requiring much higher intellectual demands than janitorial ones (and I certainly do want us to presume that!), we need to figure out how to in the short term allow people doing those jobs to have good lives and in the long term allow them to have good lives while robots do those jobs.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding your comment.
This economic system isn't working for the vast majority of Americans, hence the support for Bernie and Trump.
However, small sample size notwithstanding, I have been involved with mentoring in an outreach program targeted at people with little to no CS experience. And these students were coding circles around "CS" grads in under 6 weeks. Sure the theoretical foundations aren't there yet, but, do you really need that much math to stand up an app, build a website, or do any of the work expected of a junior dev?
I 100% agree with you in that most people don't have the aptitude to become the next John Carmack, but, at least in my experience, that's not where the jobs are anyway. You don't need to be Linus to generate business value using Linux, and you don't need to be James Gosling to working Java enterprise apps. The jobs of the future need an army of people to modernize infrastructure and build using existing tools. These are the middle class anchors of the 21st century; I'd say look no farther than the "analyst" pipelines of the American finance industry to see this happening.
Have you ever been in any kind of teaching role, or observed some students at tutoring labs? Some people are just unteachable/not cut out for it.