Now the part that's good news, and almost nobody says it out loud.
Look at the people already inside. Ten years in, a title, a network. They don't have that pressure to learn coding. They open the tooling, they describe what they want, they ship it. Six months of that and they realize they're forgetting how to write code.
That's not an insult. That's what hands do. Stop using one and it gets weaker. No skill survives not being used.
And they're not wrong to feel safe. They have the title, the years behind them, the people who already know their name. Nothing in their week punishes them for not remembering. The bill for that arrives later and quietly, which is the worst way for a bill to arrive.
Now look at the people trying to get in. Same tooling, opposite position. They can produce output on day one without understanding a line of it, so a lot of them quietly decide the understanding is optional. Why grind through data structures when the machine writes the loop?
So you have two sides collapsing on technical competency. One is forgetting. One is refusing to learn.
That's your whole opportunity, and I'm going to say the ugly version of it out loud. It is your luck that people are lazy. It's your luck that they don't want to learn coding. It's good for you. Now you just do the things that others aren't willing to do.
Most people will not bother. Use other people's unwillingness to learn, their unwillingness to invest in the fundamentals, as your competitive advantage, because that's exactly what makes you stand out when you go to market.
The supply of people who genuinely understand how software works is shrinking. The demand for somebody who can tell whether the machine got it right is going up.
So the boring answer is the winning one. Learn the fundamentals properly. Not because it's noble. Because hardly anybody else is going to, and scarce is scarce.
Which technical thing are you quietly hoping to get away with never really understanding? And is it the same one the person sitting next to you is hoping to skip?
If those are the same thing, it isn't a coincidence and it isn't bad luck. It's whichever thing felt boring to both of you in week two. Boring is doing the sorting here, and it only sorts in your favor if you're the one who goes back to it.