If you can cope with instructing work-to-rule workers, you can code. No extraordinary smarts required.
As of "much smarter than above average programmer", programmers in average are at IQ 115. If we take "above average" as +15 points (IQ's standard deviation) and "much smarter" as another +30 points, we end at 160 IQ points person. Four standard deviations make that person one in roughly 16 000, or sixteen thousands. I think you should know a lot of people, much more than 150 or so of average person, to know many of them.
And to offer you my experience, my brother seems not to have any problems with coding in Python. He is well into 40-s, most of his career he was at the C*O positions and right now he decided to change venues one more time.
Nice example that if you define the terms to suit your argument then you can make any argument. Also, the word 'smart' has much wider scope than just IQ. It is also possible that the people OP knows are not sampled randomly from general population (he might be in a chess club for example).
Personally as a coder I have workflows, tool-chains developed over several years that writing a code to create a MVP is faster than learning no-code tools, also the end product is lean and stays with me.
So I haven't used these tools but tried notion for the first time yesterday to export my kindle highlights(HN comments)[1], So I can see the value in these no-code tools in automation workflows for even coders.
[1] https://twitter.com/Abishek_Muthian/status/14199150634906050...
Sounds to me like a generally applicable thing to be honest. Even as a programmer I can't just pick up my favorite language and use it for any type of software. There is mature/user-friendly infrastructure and libraries for X/Y targeting Z, for a limited set of permutations.
IMO Bubble is only ms-paint+ (entry point lowcode) and Photoshop (or Figma) is yet to hit the market.
His QC simulation code in matlab would write the output of each iteration to a file because he didn’t optimize the object sizes. A simulation that should take an hour now takes 20 lol. It’s probably like in the Sherlock show how Holmes says he doesn’t want to waste neurons memorizing constellations.
More, they weren't even aware that these things could be improved. So no, I'm not convinced life science is intrinsically harder or the people there smarter. I attended some biochem and genetics classes at uni and once you have the foundations the concepts are actually pretty simple, there's just a lot of new terminology and random facts to memorize.
Often there are multidisciplinary research teams and depending on how little a specialization already overlaps with CS/SE-ish topics, having at least someone who realizes which mundane stuff can be automated can be invaluable.
Let me guess, you are one of the brilliant ones.
I've met some dim people in science research tracks.
Our microscope acquisition code is a single 25k LOC C file.
That's not really proving your point about them being "smarter than any developer". Lots of developers are smart enough to build their own tools.
