“If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all” ~ Michelangelo
When I started in the Indian IT industry more than 25 years ago, there were hardly any software services companies. Software was something that you gave away free with hardware. Our first programmers were math or physics graduates who received a few weeks of training in COBOL programming and were put on the job.
They advanced their own abilities through the hard knocks gained by servicing customers. Those customers would come down hard on us when the software systems we developed failed to deliver what they were supposed to deliver. It was rare when the trial balance, in any financial system we developed, would actually tally within a few months of delivering the system. The entire industry was a few thousand programmers learning pretty much on the job.