[ThrowawayR2]

> It feels like a lot engineers now days don't seem to have a good cs background. They don't see to understand things like cache, paging, virtual memory,cpu pipelines, algorithms or other things pretty fundamental to CS.

Yes but nearly every software developer job is web stuff these days and in the web world, they don't need it. (Cue all the HN posters saying "college is a waste of money" and "it's just a piece of paper".) All they need to be able to do is glue together libraries and frameworks created by people who do happen to have good CS backgrounds. You really have to go out of your way to find jobs that actually require knowing "cache, paging, virtual memory, cpu pipelines, algorithms", etc.

> When we have the next industry crash (.com crash) will these people stick around?

It won't crash, because everybody needs a web site these days, but it will become commoditized because the bar to entry keeps getting lower and lower. I've seen some comments already on HN saying that software pay is gradually becoming bimodal.

[overgard]

There are so many things to do with computers that have nothing to do with the web, where native code is incredibly important. There's probably even more of those jobs than there are web dev jobs, it's just that hacker news is a bit of an echo chamber.

[ThrowawayR2]

Kind of a half-assed estimate but summing up web/mobile vs everything else (excluding QA) from the counts from this article https://learning.linkedin.com/blog/tech-tips/the-american-ci... gives us about 13% of software jobs being non-web. I lump in mobile with web since a lot of mobile apps are cross platform hybrid apps using web stuff.

Personally, I think even that estimate is too high; I'd be surprised if the true number wasn't somewhere closer to 5%.

[mattmanser]

Go on then, go look for them.

Go search on job boards and fine all those mystical jobs.

They are the tiny minority.

[overgard]

The last job I had was doing graphics coding for a video game, and before that it was c++ CAD programming. They’re not hard to find at all. They probably seem more rare because the barrier to entry is much higher but I think that's a good thing.

[mattmanser]

Selective hearing from you.

You claim there's MORE than web dev jobs. Go to a job site, type in developer, and count the web dev jobs. Now count the non-web dev jobs.

Worse still, you're repeating this and replying to me even after ThrowawayR2 gave you a hard number to go off (a mere 13%).

Not only do you have web businesses, but also almost all enterprise apps are now web apps. I'd guess that those are the vast majority of jobs in the market, but again you probably won't believe that.

They're all web dev jobs because it's easy to deploy. 20 years ago, I used to work in places that had to roll out desktop apps to everyone. It was a nightmare, as well as a security nightmare as they had to have the db open to the whole network.