Programmers should stop celebrating incompetence

In the valiant effort to combat imposter syndrome and gatekeeping, the programming world has taken a bad turn down a blind alley by celebrating incompetence. You don't have to reduce an entire profession to a clueless gang of copy-pasta pirates to make new recruits feel welcome. It undermines the aspiration to improve. It reduces the work to magical thinking. It is not good.I say this an evaluation of the prescription, not of the diagnosis. The programming world absolutely has had, and still has, challenges with imposter syndrome and gatekeeping. In large part because, unlike so many other professional fields, a high percentage of the people working in programming are self-taught. (Including yours truly!).