Being good at acquiring fancy academic degrees != Being good at programming.
If you ask the top 1% of FAANG engineers, the Jeff Dean's and Ken Thompsons to try to make it as professional ballet dancers, they're probably going to fail pretty hard too.
Granted "academic degrees" and "programming" are probably more similar than "programming" and ballet, but still.
The metaphor "ballet dancer" and "basketball player" or "basketball player" and "gymnast" might be more apt. You can be good at one thing and not good at a related thing, even if both require 'using your brain a lot' or 'using your body a lot'
I was working as a software developer before I got a degree. You're missing my point though.
Academic degrees and programming are a lot more similar than programming and ballet. People who got engineering and science degrees, as a population, are going to be more likely to become software engineers vs. the general population. This seems like a pretty obviously true claim. It's not a claim that people without degrees can't be software engineers. That's a pretty large population and I am a counter-example. My point is even within a population of people who in theory are more likely to become good, and who have had some motivation and invested time, it often does not work.
If anyone could program then we wouldn't be getting paid what we are. The reason why random people aren't all competing for our programming jobs isn't that our jobs are the worst. There are much worse jobs that people are competing over.
EDIT: and by the way, athletes in general do much better than the non-athlete population even in areas very dissimilar to the current sport.
If you ask the top 1% of FAANG engineers, the Jeff Dean's and Ken Thompsons to try to make it as professional ballet dancers, they're probably going to fail pretty hard too.
Granted "academic degrees" and "programming" are probably more similar than "programming" and ballet, but still.
The metaphor "ballet dancer" and "basketball player" or "basketball player" and "gymnast" might be more apt. You can be good at one thing and not good at a related thing, even if both require 'using your brain a lot' or 'using your body a lot'