Well, you have kids that can blow away long time professionals and people who make it in the industry right out of high school. You don’t hear of as many kids who as teenagers can perform medical procedures or fly planes (if any for the former).
I think part of it is the accessibility of both the tools and the knowledge compared to other fields. The two aforementioned professions are both gatekept behind expensive credentials as well (pillows don’t need a degree, but iirc the process to get licensed isn’t cheap). Additionally:
> shit out a few lines of javascript/ruby/whatever and go get a job.
Actually seems fine for a number of roles out there. There are plenty of jobs where it’s enough to shit out code that just works, while you probably won’t be commanding the salaries people gush over in more tech centric communities such as this, you can certainly make more money that you would in the typical roles that many people find available post-education. I’ve argued about this before here, but in my experience, you don’t have to be that great of a developer to maintain some form of employment in the industry.
When you have a field, that pays well, even in some of the lower windows, has a vast amount of learning resources readily available, is not locked behind time and money expensive credentials and has all the tools needed to learn do the job for free, it seems almost stupid not to consider it.