It is certainly true that the worst of players paid to play professional ball at the A or AA level exceed my baseball capability by several orders of magnitude. It seems to me, however, that the distinction being made is only attempting to differentiate between people with the minimum skills required to play the game at all.

Likewise, I know plenty of people whom I would never trust to develop software for me in Perl or any other language. Many of these same people I deeply respect for other reasons; they simply don't have what it takes to think through a software project and make it a reality. It is unpleasant to consider that people who don't have those minimum skills would be trying to work in a field where they should know they can't do the job, much less well.

What's most interesting about this metaphor is the set of players who really need more seasoning at AAA, but are 'stuck' in the bigs because they've used up all their options. The demands put on them day-to-day prevent them from learning the skills that would allow them to become the quality player they could be. I think this happens in IT also.

Seeing that my salary has somehow crept up to the major league minimum (not a bad thing, I might add), I am now really hoping I'm not one of those people who has been elevated to his level of incompetence. In the mean time, I'm going to give myself the benefit of the doubt, and vote myself a (4). But all other things being equal, I'd still rather be the starting 2B at AAA than ride the bench all season for the Pirates.