First of all, I've only heard this from software engineers.
Second of all, most of us haven't worked on the software that send people to space or similar. We unfortunately only move data from one place to another.
People wrote production code after 6-months of boot camp. Writing code is easy. (Quality, scalability etc. are the harder parts).
Part of this is captured with this famous quote:
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." - Jeff Hammerbacher
So the insult is probably to a negligible fraction of programmers.
Second of all, most of us haven't worked on the software that send people to space or similar. We unfortunately only move data from one place to another.
People wrote production code after 6-months of boot camp. Writing code is easy. (Quality, scalability etc. are the harder parts).
Part of this is captured with this famous quote:
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." - Jeff Hammerbacher
So the insult is probably to a negligible fraction of programmers.