[twawaaay]

> I also wonder how much of this is due to our dysfunctional work culture (as a society) where people are so detached from their jobs it feels like they're just an invisible cog in some big machine.

Regardless of the initial reasons, if you are continuously detached from your work you are extremely unlikely to get very good at it.

Our brains are actually wired to filter out information that you don't find interesting and even if somehow get aware of the information -- to quickly forget it.

Our RAS (reticular activation system) is part of brain that wakes your attention to facts that your subconscious is programmed to recognise as interesting. Have you ever noticed that when you get interested in some topic (for example cycling) you immediately start noticing a lot more about the topic in your life (like when somebody rides a particularly interesting bike) even though nothing about the world changed in the meantime (no more interesting bikes today than a month ago)?

Now that I think it might be enough explanation for why devs these days seem to be so weak compared to what I remember from decades ago. Because if the same problem of detachment from work applies to large portion of population then this large portion of population will be doing very poorly at getting better at what they are doing.

In software development the additional problem is that the number of developers has been growing exponentially for quite a long time and so there is only very small proportion of devs who remember world from before "big tech" boom.