The good programmers carry the weight of the industry on their shoulders. For every 100 code monkeys, you may have only one truly great, natural programmer. Those great ones are the ones who are making software projects and products successful. The rest who can "basically" code are relegated to unimportant parts of the codebase or get stuck in maintenance programming. When the industry shifted from real programming in core languages like C and assembly to casual languages like JavaScript, the bar was lowered to accommodate the low skill programmers because the Web 2.0 and beyond ecosystem was less stringent and more driven by visuals instead of hard logic. That made programming into a commodity industry, but the hard stuff is still being done by the master programmers. You don't put the JS-kiddies on the firmware part of a project and you don't waste your natural programmers on scripting tasks. It works out because the roles define the type of programmer you need for them. This applies with cooking as well. You don't hire a home cook to be your executive chef in a Michelin rated restaurant and you also don't have your Bocuse d'or winning chefs making you a sammich. While anyone can cook, you wouldn't want just anyone cooking you a meal that will cost you $100+ per plate. Same goes for programming, as it should be.