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The number of people who can write good code naturally is very small. Current training deosn't help, much more than grammar classes help playwrights.

There is very little incentive to become a good coder, for there are so many poor ones.

There is very little incentive to become a good coder, for there are so many poor ones.

And why are there so many poor ones? Because there is no punishment for being a poor coder in most companies. It has been documented at least since Fred Brooks 1st edition of "The Mythical Man Month" that there is at least an order of magnitude difference between good coders and bad ones. (Actually, IMO, that is also true for good architects and good PM's.) But -- in the last 30 years, are the good coders rewarded and the bad ones punished? No.

As to why that is...I think it is because IT is viewed as a cost center. Therefore all executive efforts are on cutting costs. Managers have to follow that lead. Rationally, if the people who contributed to good projects were retained, and people on failed projects (say, after your third failed project you're history) were canned, over time the good people would be retained and the number of failed projects would go down. But I have never seen any company attempt to perform any long term analysis on projects to start producing working systems and reducing the number of failed projects. I suppose there are a few, but I have never seen even one.

I had a bunch of CS grads working on a project in 1991. A brief code review turned my stomach. It was time to teach those folks how to write quality code. Half of them were unwilling and left the project. Most of the balance of the staff are still on the project. Those folks point with some pride to an SEI level 3 certification. Another group on the same floor was inspired by the success and they have also achieved a level 3 certification. Both projects are classified, DoD efforts that have been running well over 20 years. That is exactly the kind of project/group that can achieve SEI level 3 or better. Short fuse projects rarely attain that level of quality.