[vineyardmike]

The article is pretty bad, I agree. Everything you said, I agree.

I think this sentiment, “engineers aren’t what they used to be… they don’t understand the why as much”, is a very common sentiment today. I think there’s some truth. I know plenty of “cloud engineers” that can tell you the best practices of architecting on AWS but not the why those are best practices, not why distributed systems are hard, etc.

The reality though is that this is often fine. Most problems aren’t novel. Most people shouldn’t need to re-derive knowledge from first principles as part of the job. You learn that in school, and then you go to work and solve the problem asked of you. Not every problem is Google scale we know this, but also not every problem requires a phd and ends in patents. Sometimes it’s just a low traffic crud app with a react front end.

The CTO probably wants to be a thought leader or something. I don’t know peoples motivations. It seems like they read an article on pack/map and applied it to why their employees suck?