This seems to become one of the hottest topics about the socials of software development.

After last weeks' posts by Ayende on whether Microsoft should target "Mort" instead of the Alpha Geeks (and all the other post about that topic around the community), Scott Dorman said that there is an even worse problem: the "mass market developer":

A "mass market developer" is usually at the low end of the developer spectrum.A more frustrated code monkey, ibid. They have no formal training and are what could generally be considered to be a "code monkey", but in the derogatory sense. These are the people who stitch together snippets of code found on the Internet and in books to make an application, without having an appreciation or understanding what the principles behind the code or the concept of coding are.

And Scott also expresses his frustration noticing what everybody has probably already seen itself: "monkey questions".

The trend that I have been seeing is the increasing number of discussion forum posts by individuals claiming to be developers (mostly professional developers) asking what I can only call "monkey questions". These are questions that are so basic that they really shouldn't even be asked. Questions that show a complete lack of understanding of programming concepts and the programming language as well as a sheer lack of initiative to learn.

Last week there was an intense thread on the NZ.NET mailing list, and one of the messages said more or less:

[I don't like idea of moving the ML to a public accessible repository because] then the ML will be spammed with questions by n00bs from India, China, pick-your-spam-country, asking "How can I do basic xyz? It's urgent!"

Is this becoming more and more a threat for the professional developer? Or will companies be smart enough to understand that "good developers costs a bit more then bad ones, but are 10 times more productive"?

Here is the original post: Programming for the masses.