There's not really a single threshold though. I think the shittier thing is that software is just an incredible market for lemons. Even us programmers ourselves don't really know how good we are, and there is no way to accurately compare all the problems we faced with the problems we avoided. So forget about non-technical management, they could be paying twice as much for someone who takes 10x as long to deliver a feature and never have the first hope of getting a clue. Or they could hire someone who is demonstrably fast but paints the whole system into a corner where the next critical business feature requires a complete rewrite.
Experience is no silver bullet, but it generally goes a lot further than non-technical tea-leaf-reading or junior dev shotgun programming.
Experience is no silver bullet, but it generally goes a lot further than non-technical tea-leaf-reading or junior dev shotgun programming.