Some additional points, sorry, I’ll try to keep them brief.
- To maintain their competitive advantage, those with foundational skills, and awareness of the value of those skills, might instinctively prefer to keep the facts about those foundational skills secret, in order to maintain their moat (competitive advantage).
- Some individuals/groups will use the foundational skills to build various products and/or a kind of cult around them. For example, the inventors of Flash seemed to have a strong commercial motive and also a cohort of users to monetise (young enthusiasts and later digital agencies).
- Businesses that want to apply technology to their own specific use cases will choose to adopt the products because the cults around those products provide a ready labour pool much larger than just the limited pool of the formally educated (e.g. computer science graduates). Though that seems to be changing lately.
- Confusingly, for the less-educated like me, there will appear to be large overlap between educated and non-educated practitioners, making it appear as if education is optional. In reality, the educated (or at least, those who really absorbed it) have a distinctive knowledge advantage, which will bear out over time, in the form of good execution, promotions, business success, etc.
On point 4 … as someone who entered the industry straight out of community college with little formal education … this would explain why certain people in the industry, including some who I physically used to work alongside, have suddenly “zoomed” ahead into becoming successful entrepreneurs with profitable firms, executives, etc. It’s not just “luck” or “who you know” … it’s actually a lot of fundamental knowledge which I didn’t realise I didn’t have.