[tracker1]

You'd be surprised... I did a LOT of cleanup work for a private college that had a lot of "clever" developers that didn't understand static variables in C#, or how the ASP.Net lifecycle worked. Race conditions and all kinds of weird errors when the system got busy. Not to mention a lot of "fun" performance issues.

Just because someone has a CS degree doesn't mean they actually know what they're doing.

[mattmanser]

That's different, those are clever people who are bad developers. But too proud to admit it even to themselves. You come across them a lot in small/mid sized companies and non-tech IT teams.

Cloudflare's no longer the darling of HN, but they unquestionably have clever people who are excellent developers. Just maybe not excellent at web dev and cache invalidation by the sound of it.

[tracker1]

My main point is, you can be working with people that are pretty smart and well educated, with a pretty good baseline understanding of theory but that doesn't always mean they have the actual experience and/or thorough enough understanding of a given set of tooling and environment to implement correctly.

I say this as someone who is autodidactic (self-taught) with regards to software engineering. I never stop learning, reading, experimenting and just gaining as much understanding over everything I touch as I can. My mind doesn't always work like most people. And my statements are not meant to be insulting, just my point of view from the outside...

In that, I feel that a lot of FAANG (whatever the correct/current conflation is) tend to rely on a lot of focus that tends to favor those with a formal education, and those closer to that education (less experienced outside school). In practice, my experience is that this will lead to an excess in "Enterprise Pattern" usage as well as unnecessary complexity which leads to an increased risk of error.