Y'know, for some of us peasants, dev work can just be a way out of poverty. We don't have engineering degrees from a top school, we don't work for the FANGs, an

Y'know, for some of us peasants, dev work can just be a way out of poverty. We don't have engineering degrees from a top school, we don't work for the FANGs, and we don't work on mission-critical code. The software industry has expanded a lot since the 80s, and now hobbyists can and do make a living out of it even without formal training. So what? When I started web dev, I earned $15/hr. Beat the $8/hr I was making before that in landscaping. Now I make a little more than that, which still isn't much. My clients/employers don't pay crazy wages and they don't expect crazy quality work. They know they get what they pay for, and it works out for both parties. Maybe's OK to have shitty, mediocre code for 90% of the world's needs... a small biz website, with the ecommerce/PCI bits outsourced? Sure, why not. It mostly works, and if it goes down for a few hours a year, maybe that doesn't meet super-reliability standards (can we count 8s instead of 9s?) but it gets the job done well enough? Shrug. Sure, proper engineer techniques matter for certain applications. I would never want to touch industrial machines, or medical, or space, or automobiles... anything that could blow up and/or kill someone. But most code out there is just for some local, small-scale use, mostly temporary anyhow and bound to obsolete in a few years if not months. There will always be mediocre businesses needing mediocre devs for mediocre pay, just as there will be elite enterprises that require the world's smartest people. Problem is, git was designed by the super smart for the super smart, great engineering with terrible UX. And it was kinda just trickled down to the rest of us, and it feels a bit like trying to teach Mom to use DOS and edit config.sys just to play a game. Now consumer software UX has leaped forward by decades and it shows, but a lot of the command-line dev tools are still incredibly arcane. They don't have to be, but it's not a priority to fix/improve their UX because, I suppose, it's engineers who are proud of their engineering, not proud of their ability to dumb it down for the rest of us. I don't blame them, I just know I can't meaningfully contribute to git (the project) because I'm not smart enough, well trained enough, whatever, and that complaints would fall on deaf ears like yours. It's an altogether different culture. Elitist by design, or meritocratic if you will. And believe or not, I've probably spent more time learning git -- reading documentation, diagramming it out with coworkers, cloning repos and experimenting with commands, etc., following a shit-ton of tutorials -- than any other skill I've ever had to learn. It was quicker to learn Perl and regex than mid-level git. If you want to pay for the world's would-be engineers to receive all the training to go from mere dev to proper "software engineers", by all means please do. But otherwise, well... you know what? World's gonna keep producing mediocrity. Most of us are just average.