My best friend (a consultant in salesforce) told me that he feels that software development is becoming like a blue collar casual job that anyone who has enough IQ can just pickup and start working. Have in mind that, he doesn't even have coding basics so I take his opinion with a grain of salt (since his work is just knowing the salesforce framework and teaching his clients what button to click where. He spends 80% of his day in business calls or meetings).

Personally I think that anyone can learn coding basics, but only certain people can stay in this field because you need to constantly grow, change, learn new things, have a huge treshold for failure and also somehow motivate yourself. Only 20% of my unversity peers are actually coding nowadays. Also only around 2-3 people out of 10 people in coding bootcamps actually become devs. So for me dev job is clearly not a casual job.

What are your thoughts on this?

The consultant from Salesforce tells just another manager's bullshit.

If it would be so easy, there would not be a shortage of developers. But there is shortage and really severe one due to more companies going fully digital because of COVID. And just because of successful companies growths and requiring more Dev power.

It’s easier to get a dev job than it is to land a position in many other fields because there’s a shortage of developers.
However, you can have a higher than average IQ and still be mediocre: either because you’re lazy, you give up too easily, you don’t pay attention to details, you’re not rigorous.
This is what I’m noticing daily at work. Many colleagues have decent logic and problem solving skills, but they’ll mess things up a lot because they don’t double check their work, they don’t test their code, they don’t follow basic procedures etc.
Yet they’re happy with their work and even boast that it’s easy. They don’t realize it’s all those extra little efforts that make your work WORTHWILE, and ALSO more tiresome and draining.

Salesforce consultants aren't worth the shit they produce 99.9% of the times.

There's a massive difference between being able to do the job, and knowing wtf you're actually doing while doing the job.

Your friend doesn’t know what he’s talking about. If what he was saying were true, a lot more ppl for coding bootcamps would be successful. I remember having to deal with classmates who couldn’t remember to run npm install for projects and they would complain the project was broken and they couldn’t work. This was 6 months into the program. The school was a dumpster, but geez. Classmate also had a mentor who was an employed dev and he couldn’t figure it out either that you just have to run an npm command.

I think that being a programmer is not defined by what you know and what you can do now but by the ability, endurance and commitment in facing new problems.

Anybody could do that, but not everyone does or is willing to.

I would pity the poor guy because he works with Salesforce. Then I'd ignore any tech related opinion he has.

I just checked Salesforce website… can we just call them “parameter typers” instead of “programmers”?

@ars1 funny how some people think that if they landed a job that pays them around $50 per hour then these people are automatically qualified to have an opinion about everything and that opinion is worth something. the ego

This thinking is the reason so much bad software exists with dozens of dependencies.

@rov3rand0m no, but a lot of consultants make use of the no-code solutions on platform and make a chaotic mess of things.

Don't get me wrong, these things can be good when used correctly, but Salesforce is about the bigger picture and how everything ties together. There's a solid brick wall for poor optimisations that prevent things from running.

Source: a dev who works with Salesforce.

I think that the issue is the definition of blue collar job.

It's - if I'm not mistaken - usually associated with physical labour.

A good programmer however does need two things: intelligence and psychological resilience. I've seen many interns who thought that programming would be "great for money" - and who gave up sooner or later cause they couldn't handle the stress, had trouble to adapt quickly or just couldn't cope with the mental (over-)load of programming.

There is another fundamental issue I have with the statement of the salesforce guy: "can just pickup and start working".

I'd really wish people would stop being so incredibly dumb.

Physical labour isn't easy and depending on job requires quite a lot of skills.

Just because a skill is basic, doesn't mean everyone can do it.

E.g. I'm completely unable to recognize measurements. I can point of course at a comparison of two different sized sticks, but answering the question how long each stick is - NO FUCKING CLUE.

Reason I'm not really into anything crafty that requires taking measurements.

I cannot do repetitive tasks. I get aggressive - like really men slaughtering aggressive - out of boredom.

Things that some blue collar jobs have as an absolute requirement.

I try to teach interns these things by letting them work on non programming tasks in the company...

Recognition and appreciation that no job is easy.

He's just bought the SF bull. That's all there is to it.

SF has been heavily relying on their "clicks not code" mantra for ages now. They tend to have a *very* low opinion of general devs, think they cause far more problems than they solve, and so try to preach them out of existence. In reality it's because the proprietary dev tools and frameworks that Salesforce provide are so awful and out of date you're near guaranteed to fall into one trap or another, but they're blind to that.

SF isn't really a company you can work for without "taking the pill" so to speak, so I'm not surprised. But yeah... ignore everything tech related that he claims.

Sounds like a typical non-technical "developement" manager response.

Thanks for the comments guys! Feeling grateful that Im not alone on this.