I know that I shouldn't contribute to this, since a dozen others also latched onto that introductory statement of the OPs to say, essentially, that software developers aren't intelligent. But I feel obligated to respond in defense of my profession.

> Way too many devs have kind of a god complex just because they can tell a finite state machine what to do. This is especially ridiculous because a large portion of devs are writing glorified CRUD web apps in some opinionated web framework.

The role of a software developer is to refine ideas of business people, codify them, satisfy stakeholders, and otherwise serve and protect business interests. It's not just writing code - you have to make decisions large and small that can have significant impacts on your company and customers. In any CRUD app, this quickly reaches a very high level of complexity which requires a high degree of engineering and social ability to manage.

It's easy to diminish any profession (oh you just use numpy, oh you just go golfing with executives, oh you just type in symptoms and prescribe pills that have been marketed to you for years, oh you just use formulas discovered by other people). Let's not do that, because one might start to look foolish quite quickly.

"somehow" is the important part here. I meant to be humble, but obviously a lot of people are sleeping not that well at the moment.