| Lets look at it from an evolution of technology angle. 10-15 years ago we had pain points with web apps and making them more fully featured/responsive and dealing with things breaking at scale. They were kind of clunky to build so, we did what all good engineers do and figured out how to make things easier to use for everyone. Now a days, the "kids" are learning how to build web apps that don't require a deep level of knowledge about the stack - we've done a fantastic job building out the tooling that abstracts a lot of these concerns away from the "average" developer. They know if I install framework X and use Library Y the two will communicate correctly. I might understand how they communicate, but don't need to know the intricacies at this time. Technology is always evolving and what you need to know at a deep level is changing.
60s/70s/80s - The size of the program, how it was laid out on disk, disk sectors, memory layout. All that mattered to get the best performance. You needed to understand how the hardware worked intimately. 90s/ early 00s- Managed languages (Java etc.) become more of a thing and you need to understand less about all the gotchas the prior generations faced. The framework and language abstracted a lot of the prior generation's challenges away and increases in hardware capacity reduced the need to layout programs just so on the disk or in RAM. Early 00s-Present - Hardware kept growing exponentially in terms of capacity and performance, and we started placing more emphasis on building out scalable, fully functioning web applications (thin clients) rather than thick clients running on a desktop. People figured out a lot of these applications were simply wrappers about DATABASE activities and wrote frameworks that made writing the backend for such apps KISS simple. RoR I'm looking at you! This freed up people to focus on the bells and whistles the user interacted with and reduced the need for anyone developer to know the intimate details of how their framework worked. It's a changing world and the next generation of programmers is always going to be starting at our current level of abstraction, much like we started at our prior generation's and built our way up. Challenges we faced, overcame, and turned into libraries, become the starting assumption for the new kids that they'll build up from. On the flip side, I gotta ask, what are you looking for? There are so many "full stack" combinations (language, server, SQL/NoSQL database, front end scripting library) now that the odds of finding a person with deep experience using everything you are using, unless you've reduced to the lowest possible common denominator, is low. Are you looking for someone you can train into the position and has enough knowledge not to blow their foot off, or do you want someone who you can plugin ready to go? Your expectations will influence how you're viewing the candidates, your expectations, and your relative measure of disappointment in them. |