This comment completely ignores and perhaps even intentionally muddies the central thesis of my parent post, which was: there is a distinct and codified divide between "grunt work you can do with minimal training" and "seriously difficult work" in other fields that does not exist in software.

For instance, the sentence right after the one you quote ends with: "...or really extraordinary dedication". The handful of people you mention in your post, I think, count as extraordinary.

To reiterate my point:

The IT guy who helps hack out some spreadsheets isn't an actuary. The nurse who changes sheets isn't a doctor. But in software, there's no distinction -- in terms of externally recognized job titles -- between the guy hacking on wordpress templates or apps that burn my phone's battery and steal my data for no reason, and someone working on a piece of critical infrastructure.

I can't really respond to your anecdata without starting a flame war, but suffice it to say that perhaps some people would consider PHP or Perl or JavaScript cogent counter-examples to the point you're trying to make.

Finally, lots of actuaries without degrees rise to the top of their organizations and get to work on really cutting-edge stuff. Those people are extreme outliers. The same exact thing is true in software. Literally the only difference is that actuaries don't have the same sort of blindness to statistics that software people do, and I think the reason is that there's a clearer distinction between "grunt work related to actuarial work" and "professional-grade actuarial work".

If we made that distinction in software, then I think the perception that you can do real software engineering without a degree would shift far closer to "Exceptional" than it is now.