alt Hacker NewsI called my doctors surgery because I couldn't login into their web bookings site. The receptionist said "I'll check your password" then she "oh it's all funny characters" and I realised she was reading my real password that was generated by my password manager. This was only a few years ago.
The most concerning part about the belief that bootstrappy self-taught hackers are able to tackle any type of problem just as well as experienced engineers with a solid academic background is how the ignore the fact that hacking together an implementation is a very small part of the problem, and actually knowing the problem domain is of critical importance.
This is why we end up with businesses running services where a receptionist has access to customer passwords. Those who designed the system weren't even in a position to understand why that was a critical flaw in the design, let alone a problem that needed fixing.