[bob1029]

Titles have always been meaningless to me. I have seen CTOs that are amazing humans and fully capable of performing code review over their company's codebases. I have also seen CTOs who are late to meeting/no-shows, less competent than junior developers, etc.

Titling nonsense aside, what passes as "senior" today would be a no-hire decision for a junior developer slot in 2005. Things have slid pretty far in my view. There aren't many "developers" out there who are willing to push as hard as you had to 2 decades ago. ChatGPT basically shoves the tutorial & job offer down your throat these days. In the 90s you had to drive to the fucking library to learn about what a computer is - If you were lucky, they'd have a box of AOL trial CDs on the checkout counter.

If you want to get as good as some of the greybeard crowd, you are going to have to invent your own hell and then practice inside of it. No one will do this for you. I feel like those of us constrained by dial-up (or worse) were actually really fortunate in some ways. This wall was a fantastic filter. It really made you think "is this interesting enough to suffer through, or should I just observe it in the news?" Imagine spending a month debugging a problem without the aid of google, stack overflow, et. al. Most "developers" today would laugh and walk away from the industry if they experienced this.

For me, front-end / back-end job duty separation is the #1 canary pointing towards a weakening of general expectations for "software people". Not saying that the developers need to know how to use photoshop to design & iterate sophisticated UI designs with the client's marketing team, but when I first started out I was expected to take a final PSD and convert it to a reasonable HTML/CSS layout - in addition to all other backend/database/hosting/infra work.

One might make accusations that someone who manages all of these things is mediocre at all of them, but I would counter that shipped products are infinitely more valuable than things that never ship. I have observed that in companies where you have to assemble the entire justice league & merge 10+ PRs to update a dropdown list's contents, things usually aren't shipping very rapidly.