Josef, as someone that has been coding for a living since the late 1980s with a CS degree from a major university on the east coast. A lot of what you said is true. In the old days, you just had a compiler and wrote some code and you were GTG. As long as you could prove you could write code then that was good enough for a good paying job. It was a mostly nerdy endeavor that few people wanted to do because it was so "geeky" but it paid reasonably well.

All that changed in the past 10 years or so since the last financial downturn. The money involved has gotten so large and companies are willing to pay exorbitant salaries for good software devs that the competition has gotten very, well, competitive to say the least. Now, everyone wants to be a software engineer. A record was set again last year for the number of CS graduates in the USA. Somewhere around 110k graduates claimed a CS degree. That's too many to fill all the jobs out there. Companies are very choosy now. Must have degree from well known university with good grades. Sometimes that isn't even enough. Many companies won't hire new grads, they only want someone with two or more years at company now. The college degree is just another barrier to entry in what is becoming a closed off society of wealthy, elitist, entitled snobs.

Back 30 years ago it was a small club of nerds, now it's a bunch of tech bros that I can't stand being around.