[cwt]

I don't think you should limit this to the "new generation." I am at around 5 years experience in the dev workforce and believe I can answer those questions to a satisfactory degree. From interviewing and professional experience these are questions that seem to give everyone trouble. I interviewed a guy with 15-20 years of experience and he didn't understand B-Trees and indexing but his mentality was: why should I bother? that is the DBAs territory.

Obviously, my background is different. I think this is the root of your issue. Most people are learning what they need in order to get a job completed. Most of the time it doesn't involve them having to build the entire application, they are asked to work on a small portion.

All things considered, I agree that devs should understand more in depth the core components of web applications.