Why do I get the feeling that bar wasn't set very high to begin with?

And it would be a shared responsibility of the communities inside the bubble to reach out and find people from a diverse range of backgrounds who show potential.

There's definitely room for improvement in that area.

Folks will rightly say "But how do devs get inside the bubble?" For sure, there's a risk of lock-out and also of homogenous culture.

That's why I'd never recommend a team that's 100% inside the bubble. Typically, on - say - a team of 4, I might recommend one apprentice, and maybe 1 from the 10%.

We're discovering that a lot of devs don't care of it's wrong, though. They're the ones who never did.

They'll have to learn when the answers are wrong :-)

Or any big city, come to that?

I've never seen one in S London

This is also helps to clarify what I mean by "tight feedback loops". It's not really about how long they take. It's about how much we reduce uncertainty (learn) in each loop.

Naturally, when I post about refactoring on LinkedIn, I get helpful comments that remind me that the large majority of developers don't know what it is.