Why I still think we're in a dangerous area with this is that there are established industries with domain experts who simply are not programmers. Inexperienced programmers might come in with solutions to problems that have genuinely good intentions -- a bridge to help people cross the creek; but there are people who already know how to build reliable bridges and you have to be able to either become one of those people or understand enough of their domain to collaborate with them.
I find a lot of great developers become pseudo-civil engineers. If you ask them to switch gears and write a video transcoder they're going to be about as useful as an intermediate programmer with zero-domain knowledge; despite having been writing software for civil engineers for that last 20 years and being in the top of their field... it's the domain knowledge that makes a big difference.
I don't think you understand what domain knowledge means. If the civil engineer is a user of VLC, Youtube, etc. then they do not have "zero domain knowledge" when writing a transcoder.
Not to mention that if they really are a great developer they'll just fork an open source project and be pretty much done.
No matter who you are, the more virgin code you write yourself today, the more immature and vulnerable your application will be.
Why I still think we're in a dangerous area with this is that there are established industries with domain experts who simply are not programmers. Inexperienced programmers might come in with solutions to problems that have genuinely good intentions -- a bridge to help people cross the creek; but there are people who already know how to build reliable bridges and you have to be able to either become one of those people or understand enough of their domain to collaborate with them.
I find a lot of great developers become pseudo-civil engineers. If you ask them to switch gears and write a video transcoder they're going to be about as useful as an intermediate programmer with zero-domain knowledge; despite having been writing software for civil engineers for that last 20 years and being in the top of their field... it's the domain knowledge that makes a big difference.