> I don't think a "programming mindset" is particularly rare ... coders are reluctant to admit this because they like to see themselves as intelligent in a unique way compared to other professions

A programmer is exposed, all day long, to clients who do not have the "programming mindset." There are two possible reasons for this:

1. Selection bias — people who have a "programming mindset", just don't end up being the clients of software firms, maybe because they decide to build things themselves. (Unlikely, IMHO: to avoid needing to get someone else to build software for them, they would need to go out and learn the trade-skill minutiae of programming on top of their regular career; few people do this. Also, anyone with a sufficiently-lucrative primary career can see that this is not their comparative advantage, and so won't bother, just like they won't bother to learn plumbing but will instead call a plumber. If these people did exist in sufficiently-large numbers, they would end up being a non-negligent part of software firms' client-base. But this does not happen.)

2. Representative sampling — most people really just don't have this mindset.

Yes, there are exceptions, but they're the exceptions that prove the rule. The "domain of mental best-fit" of programming heavily overlaps with e.g. mathematics, most kinds of engineering, and many "problem-solving" occupations (e.g. forensic investigators; accountants; therapists and behavioral interventionists; management consultants; etc.) But all of these jobs together are still only amount to a tiny percentage of the population. Enough so that it's still vanishingly rare for any of them to end up as the contact-point between an ISV and a client company.

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Another thing we'd see if the "programming mindset" were more common, would be that there'd actually be wide take-up of tools that require a "programming mindset." This does not happen.

We'd expect that e.g. MS Access would be as popular as Excel. Excel wins by a landslide, because while it certainly is programmable, it does not force the sort of structured approach on people that confers benefits (to speed of development and maintainability), but only feels approachable if you have developed a "programming mindset."

We'd expect that Business Rules Engines and Behavior-Driven Development systems would actually be used by the business-people they're targeted at. Many such systems have been created in the hope that business-people would be able to use them themselves to describe the rules of their own domain. But inevitably, a programmer is hired to "customize" them (i.e. to translate the business-person's requirements into the BRE/BDD system's dialect), not because any programming per se is required, but because "writing in a formal Domain-Specific Language" is itself something that's incomprehensible without a "programming mindset."

We'd expect that people who want answers to questions known to their company's database, would learn SQL and write their question into the form of a SQL query. This was, after all, the goal of SQL: to make analytical querying of databases approachable and learnable to non-programmers. But this does not happen. Instead, there's an entire industry (Business Intelligence) acting as a shim to allow people with questions to insulate themselves from the parts of the "programming mindset" required to be able to formally model their questions; and an entire profession (business data analyst) serving as a living shim of the same type, doing requirements-analysis to formalize business-people's questions into queries and reports.

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Keep in mind, the "programming mindset" I'm describing here is not a talent. It's not genetic. It's a skill (or rather, it's a collection of micro-skills, having large overlap with problem-solving and research skills.) It's teachable. If you get a bunch of children and inculcate problem-solving skills into them, they'll all be capable of being programmers, or mathematicians, or chess players, or whatever related profession you like. The USSR did this, and it paid off for them.

The trouble with this skill, as opposed to most skills, is that people that don't learn this skill by adulthood, seemingly become gradually more and more traumatized by their own helplessness in the face of problems they encounter that require this skill-they-don't-have. Eventually, they begin to avoid anything that even smells a bit of problem-solving. High-school educators experience the mid-development stage of this trauma as "math phobia", but the trauma is generalized: being helpless in the face of one kind of problem doesn't just mean you become afraid of solving that problem; it (seemingly) builds up fear toward attempting to solve any problem that requires hard, novel, analytical thinking on your part.

And that means that, by adulthood, many people are constitutionally incapable of picking up the "programming mindset." They just won't start up that part of their brain, and will have an aversion reaction to any attempt to make them do so. They'll do everything they can to shirk or delegate the responsibility of "solving a novel hard problem through thinking."

And these people, by-and-large, are the clients of software firms.

They're also, by-and-large, the people who use most software, learning workflows by rote and never attempting to build a mental model of how the software works. This has been proven again and again in every software user-test anyone has ever done.