[schwurb]

> Nevertheless, they 'successfully' close their JIRA tickets and deliver.

Leave those quotes away and I agree. If they know enough Java to finish those tickets in a way that the bug is actually fixed and the fix itself does not impose more technical debt than needed, then those developers know exactly enough java and close their tickets successfully indeed.

I wrote my own compiler for a subset of Java (including inheritance and overriding) to MIPS in uni, among the top in class, and am currently looking to compile Haskell to a very neat kind of calculus (check out "Formality-Core"). It was a really fun experience, but I feel that compilers are immensely overhyped. I guess that is because it is a hard topic and for many people, the investment is huge, so they exagerate the benefits they percieve to reap.

Being proud of understanding something or admitting that a topic is hard is all fine, but I am absolutely allergic to elitism where it isn't just. And no, in 2019, knowing all about parsing and register allocation won't unlock superpowers anymore.