All it means is that the software engineering sector is more open to applicants with varying backgrounds. This shouldn't come as a surprise, given how relatively young and innovative the tech industry is.

There's nothing stopping someone from getting textbooks and learning the fundamentals to be a mathematician or economist, what stops that from getting them a job is the industry not being open to that.

The differentiator between "trade" and "profession" has traditionally been physical work vs intellectual work, not how tightly controlled the training is. For someone to describe something as complex as machine learning or building Netflix's backend as "a trade not a profession" is just absolutely absurd.

The days where the word profession meant anything are long gone.

Everyone is a professional these days.

Here in Germany we have the different IT trades you can learn on the job in combination with trade school (or the latter exclusively), as well as university level CS courses people can pursue after high school. Some people decide to do both.

Having hired and having close friends from both backgrounds, there's a vast difference in how both groups (on average of course, there's exceptions to everything) approach problems that crop up in the day to day job to the point that I'd call them almost incomparable. Note that I'm not talking about the stereotypical "there's enough bootcamp devs in the world already" type of difference, it's just that within almost the same time span (at least in the case of a bachelor's degree) both get completely different experiences that make them better at those specific aspects of the overall profession.

A mathematics example:

* https://github.com/llSourcell/learn_math_fast

* https://github.com/shanirivers/open-source-mathematics-degre... (draft)

Ramanujan was a "DIY" mathematician. It's just that the barriers to entry are relatively low for tech.

But sure, suppose it's a "trade", so what?