[scott_w]

> I understand how it may sound like this, given that older people will talk about assembly and electronics which most young developers have absolutely no clue about today and are still considered "software developers".

As a software engineer in his mid-30s now, I can assure you many "older people" will have little-to-no memory of messing around with assembly and electronics. When I was getting started, my boss told me about an engineer who had a deep knowledge of how to lay out data to efficiently read and process it. My response? "I just stick it in Postgres and it does it all for me!" No shade to that engineer but I do believe he was in his 50s/60s at the time, so it's quite likely he's retired on a decent pension by now!

[palata]

I am not sure exactly where you are going with that. But yeah, sure, not everybody needs assembly.

My point is that because the author uses assembly as an example does not mean that their points are not valid.

[scott_w]

I think even this point about seeing through all the abstractions being "real engineers" still limits you to, basically, people in their 60s at the youngest.

I just think it's a reductionist view and one that's not necessary. Practical example: beyond reading SQL ANALYZE, I have no idea how Postgres organises and queries data beyond a rough understanding of the model that it exposes. I guess I'm not a "real engineer" because I couldn't tell you how that data is laid out on the disk for efficiency. Yet I'm generally able to write pretty performant data models and query it.

I know engineers who can't even do that, yet their knowledge of DOM and browser logic is so fucking insane, they fixed a shitload of longstanding issues in our product. Where is the line on them being "real engineers?" Is that good enough, or do they need to go deeper into the browser?

I know engineers who don't have that level of depth in either, yet they're consistently able to write bug-free code that's extremely well tested. Do they understand how Python bytecode works? No, they don't have a clue (frankly, neither do I). Yet they solve every problem in their space.