Although it's sad, I have to agree with what you're alluding to. I think there is huge overhead and waste (in terms of money, compute resources and time) hidden in the software industry, and at the end of the day it just comes down to people not knowing how to write software.

There is a strange dynamic currently at play in the software labour market where the demand is so huge that the market can bear completely inefficient coders. Even though the difference between a good and a bad software engineer is literally orders of magnitude.

Quite a few times I encountered programmers "in the wild" - in a sauna, on the bus etc, and overheard them talking about their "stack". You know the type, node.js in a docker container. I cannot fathom the amount of money wasted at places that employ these people.

I also project that actually, if we adopt LLMs correctly, these engineers (which I would say constitute a large percentage) will disappear. The age of useless coding and infinite demand is about to come to an end. What will remain is specialist engineer positions (base infra layer, systems, hpc, games, quirky hardware, cryptographers etc). I'm actually kind of curious what the effect on salary will be for these engineers, I can see it going both ways.