I really believe that most people are smart enough to program for a living

I'm a bit on the fence for this. Yes, most people have the raw intelligence, but it takes more then that. Programming can be frustrating and tedious. It takes a tons of practice, patients and persistence.

I used to teach at university and in the "intro to programming" and they used to collect data (with permission) on students. The first exercise was "write a program that prints 'hello world'" and we would note that amount of time before a student asked for help. This is what we found (from 6 years of data and thousands of students, I wish they would release it publicly).

The quicker a student was to ask for help the higher likelihood they would drop from CS and the lower their GPA would be if they stayed.

Or to put it another way, the long they tried to work a problem out by themselves, the higher likely hood they would graduate and their GPA would be higher then those that were quick to ask for help.