[dexwiz]

Don't underestimate the knowledge gained from tangential brushes. Being able to Google and Stack-Overflow a question is dependent on knowing the vocabulary and keywords related to the problem. While tangential brushes don't give you full mastery of the domain, it gives you a bookmark on what is possible and how to find it again in the future. If you talk to newer programmers (new anything really), you will find they lack to knowledge to even properly express their problem, let alone search for answers. While more experience people may not know everything in detail, they have a better handle on various knowledge domains and where to look.

[blowski]

I agree with you on this. It's the difference between "I get a 500 error when I try to submit the blah form and here's the error in the log - it seems to crash in the foo method of the bar service when it receives a null value but it's not clear even from the debugger why it's getting null" vs "X doesn't work".

[Ocerge]

This exact situations happens to me far too often, especially when working with developers who refuse to learn the other side of the stack. Had lots of "this doesn't work" conversations with frontend devs who refuse to get their arms dirty with the database, and same from backend to frontend as well.

[allThumbs]

Very true. I don't disagree.

At a distance, though, reality can take on funny appearances.