When I got my first job, it was in the early 1990s at one of the major consulting firms. I had a just completed a computer science undergrad degree, but a lot of the people in my "start group" had no significant programming experience, or maybe not any. Some were English or History or Econ majors. They had used computers in school, but not written programs. Everyone went through an in-house boot camp to learn how to program using the firm's standard methodologies. Everyone came out of it with enough skill to be assigned to client projects and start writing code.

Software jobs at that time paid pretty well but certainly not the crazy salaries that came in the dot-com era and after. They were just pretty good jobs, and anyone who was reasonably smart could learn to do them in a couple of months. Somewhere along the line we stopped thinking that, and started thinking that you had to be some sort of high priest savant to write code that responds to a mouse click.