> was also shocked to see on an example recently that even basic computer literacy is gone.
Even with people that work with/in software roles there's often shocking knowledge gaps in areas that they work in. I've worked with more than one front-end "engineer" that only understood React--they had no conception of DOM APIs or that React was an abstraction on top of that whole underlying environment.
Even creating a static page with a simple form was create-react-app for them.
I feel your pain, the quotation marks are spot on. It does not help that they are usually former political science or media graduates who decided they will make big bucks in "tech". Very hard to work with those people, just because they entire background is do damn orthogonal to a classic engineering background.
Which company is willing to develop employees in deep technology for the long run? All of the frameworks were built with the explicit goal of abstracting the engineering part and ensuring they are easy enough for someone with a bootcamp experience to start contributing. Aka chew employees till they burn out and spit them. Rinse and repeat.
From an employee perspective, lets say I am a computer scientist, why should I spend precious time to develop myself in the fundamentals of Web when my manager just wants me to pump out React and Express.js code 24/7?
And for my promo? Well I will just point out that the system became slow and unmaintainable, propose adopting a new set of frameworks, cash the checks and move on to other pastures.
Well, that's the problem - too many people motivated only by the paycheck/career. It used to be different, people without deep technical background were largely doing things they are more competent in, and the software, for all it's troubles, without idealising the past, was a few notches higher quality than today. Myself and a lot of people I know, became engineers because we liked working with the machines. Not because someone offered us a lot of money, that came as a consequence. I couldn't imagine for example retraining myself e.g. to become a lawyer if I had a guaranteed 2x the income I have now. It must be horrible for people who force themselves like that. More than once I've heard frontend "engineers" complaining bitterly about supposed 'unpredictability' of computers, whenever they accidentally switched off some environment variable or something to that order. Just do what you enjoy, money will follow.
Even with people that work with/in software roles there's often shocking knowledge gaps in areas that they work in. I've worked with more than one front-end "engineer" that only understood React--they had no conception of DOM APIs or that React was an abstraction on top of that whole underlying environment.
Even creating a static page with a simple form was create-react-app for them.