[sgift]

The important thing is: Picasso knew what to study. Over time art had established a canon of things which helped people to get better at classical arts. Only after he studied that canon in depth and for a long time he could then break into new territories and start breaking rules intentionally to develop his own style/school.

Our craft is very bad at providing such a canon. It is even anti-intellectual in parts ("what do you mean you cannot be a master after x weeks? You are a gatekeeper! you suck"). That and we are still not sure what is important and what isn't (i.e. what should be part of the canon). Our medium of study changes all the time. Arts medium of study is reality and reality, for all our advances, doesn't really change.

[icxa]

We absolutely have a canon. You show me someone who has studied Dikjstra, Turing, Hoare, who has taken the time to pour over the Art of Computer Programming and Structures and Interpretations of Computer Programs, and poured over Ivan Sutherland, is familiar with the early days of IBM, Fairchild, Xerox PARC, and hundreds of other classics we consider to be "canon" that I am surely missing (just shooting from the hip here), and you'' be showing me, more likely than not, a damn good programmer. We have a canon, we just don't have the same studios, detail-oriented attention spans we once had, and the technology we have built is partly to blame.

Maybe related, you were once considered an ignorant brut in this country and others if you haven't read a library of literary classics, now we have kids growing up who barely know Shakespeare, or the rich body of the writing of the abolitionists or slave narratives (how many people you think in this country that even know 1/100th of what Henry Louis Gates Jr knows?) Do you think W.E.B Du Bois and Booker T Washington are common names anymore? I remember when everyone had the preamble of the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address burned into their minds, now we can't be expected to remember questions for a simple AWS Certification Exam, it's pathetic.

[eropple]

I think it is worth considering whether you may have the arrow of causality backwards. For tech specifically; your second paragraph is right on point. The folks I know who've got a fundamental grounding in the stuff you listed (and I count myself among them) all seemed to have an understanding of What Makes Systems Good before doing so. In many ways it becomes the naming of parts along with elaboration upon fairly basic ideas.

I do not believe in the idea of a bimodal distribution of software development (not just programming) aptitude, but I sometimes wonder.

(Regardless, I don't call myself an engineer. Engineers get sued if their stuff doesn't work. I'm a software developer, no matter how good and careful I might be.)