[overgard]

I think you can get that knowledge from anywhere, and university education is only one path. That being said, that knowledge is REALLY important. I don't care if you come from a boot camp or not, but I wouldn't want to hire a developer that doesn't understand those 5 things (plus a lot more).

I mean, you're using "gate keeping" as a pejorative, but, gate keeping is super important in any profession. Doctors and lawyers have a lot of "gate keeping" too, but would you really want to go to a doctor without a medical degree or a lawyer that's been disbarred? You might say what engineers do isn't as important, but then, if you're running a software business that employees 50 people, that business shutting down because their engineers can't cut it is a fairly impactful thing to a lot of people.

There's nothing wrong with having novices at work. We need novices and apprentices, they're the lifeblood of our industry. The problem is that our novices don't know they're novices, and now we have novices teaching novices and telling them that a lot of important stuff doesn't matter. Or you have novices hiring novices, and now you have bloated engineering organizations that take a ton of time and manpower to do things that should be simple, and the entire industry gets a black eye for it.

[dliff]

Yes, clearly I am not advocating that anyone of any experience should be allowed to do any job. OP is positing that there is a decline in software quality because of developers who don't know those CS concepts. I don't agree.

If you're saying you wouldn't hire a developer who didn't know those concepts in your domain, OK.. I don't know what your domain is. Software is a huge field as I'm sure you know and there are many domains in which the requirements include understanding these CS concepts.

If you're saying you wouldn't hire a developer who didn't understand CPU pipelines in ANY software engineering context, I strongly believe you would be missing out on some highly skilled & capable people.