This might be your echo chamber of only working with phds? I have been doing fm for almost 40 years and, while it became easier, I can count people who actually understand what they are doing when programming on one hand, including seniors. Interns definitely don't understand and cannot learn to do formal methods generally. We see many companies inside as we do troubleshooting for large (fortune 500) companies to mid sized ones and these projects are short and urgent: we see a lot of code and, contrary to what you are saying or what seems to be the norm on HN, most people are really really bad at all they do; most we see cannot explain how the code actually works and indeed, often it's just beaten and trialed and errored until it has a facsimile of what it is supposed to do. There are no peer reviews often no version control and these systems run in massive hospitals, manage insurance, taxes or pensions for millions of people and so on. You are grossly overestimating the norm. If people did enjoy a uni degree, they generally look disgusted when you mention something like haskell as 'that useless stuff we had to to'. When I taught prolog in uni in NL, the students asked all the time why and why not c++ or java which would get them a job and make games. No one knows what formal methods even are.
While I agree with the gist of your argument, you should also note that "organizations that hire outside consultancies for urgent issues" is a self-selecting set of orgs with terrible coding practices. There are probably many more such orgs than GP would imagine, but they are not necessarily the norm, even though they are likely to represent the vast majority of what someone working for such a consultancy would see.
I agree with that, however I think it is the majority. Being stuck in the largest companies in the world seeing the worst code makes me quite confident the majority sucks and the idea of that not being the case is just a huge outlier consumed by HN because of FAANG companies.
I'm not sure these people aren't capable of understanding, I think it's more a product of what you said: their projects were also short and urgent, and that sort of environment is not conducive to understanding, particularly given high churn where people are working on inherited code from people who also didn't have time to learn.
