Cowboys are alive and well... in development positions!
I'm really not sure why I am in this business.
I take pride in my work, I try to always do a professional job. But I am in an industry that makes the building game look positively highly skilled.
In the old days, cowboy builders would turn up, do a rotten job, demand lots of money, and after all that... you would still have to hire a new builder to come in a fix the screw up the first lot made.
These days, those people are called 'Developers' (or in the case of the really bad ones, they are called 'Architects', 'Senior Developers', or 'Senior Systems Oriented Architecture Specialists' or some such trendy job title).
Last year I must have done significantly over 100 technical interviews, probably closer to 200, to hire developers of all levels. Initially it was to hire developers at an architect level (in my book that means you should know your onions, inside and out). After that company decided it couldn't hire anyone of that level, they dropped the requirements to just ask for 'good developers'.
Of the people I interviewed, almost nobody got even the most basic questions correct. Now these weren't hard questions. They were the technical equivalent of asking a carpenter if he knew which way around to hold a saw.
Time after time, candidate after candidate, they answered incorrectly, got confused, claimed the questions were too hard, or just went blank. If I had been paying the salaries, most wouldn't have qualified for a Junior Developer With Responsibility For Making Tea position.
To make matters worse, almost all these people had exemplary CVs, listing far higher skill levels than mine, and had career histories at prestigious clients, working on 'serious' projects. And almost without exception - their CVs must have been fictional works, or else their previous employers really didn't care that they had employed complete numptys.
So why do I bother ... I sometimes wonder!