[lambdaone]

Once you give up any hope of understanding the inner workings of the frameworks you are using, you're no longer a programmer, you're a cargo cultist. Now compound this a dozen levels deep, with systems piled on systems built by people who don't understand the other systems they are building on top of, and you have the current mess.

[spoiler]

Every engineer in our industry is a Cargo cultist by that definition. Including experts. Where do you draw the line? I'm sure you have one, but your line is no less arbitrary than mine or someone elses.

[lambdaone]

A competent programmer should be able to at least conceptualise every level from the transistor up - not necessarily completely understand, but at least know roughly what it does, and what it rests on, and what rests on it. Transistors, gates, logic, state machines, instruction sets, assemblers, parsers, compilers, interpreters, operating systems, memory allocation, graphics, browsers, that sort of thing. Not at all unreasonable for someone with a decent computer science degree, surely?

Of course, you don't have to know any of that to grasp how to bang a page together with today's web frameworks; but you end up with the resource-hogging unmaintainable security disaster that is the modern web in the process.

[spoiler]

Ok, but I've worked with people who are pretty good with web dev, but I guarantee you they don't know how memory gets requested from the operating system.

Like, sure it helps in some contexts, but in their context it would largely be irrelevant.

For the wast majority of people, it's fine for them to know basic tradeoffs between stdlib container types. Most web performance problems today come from misusing tools, whether container types, bad algorithms, memory leaks (and I don't think knowing how an OS manages memory would help them in JS for example), DOM pollution, or oversized assets or whatever. And my take is that that people are often too overworked to care about it, rather than lacking awareness about these things lol

On the other hand, if you're a systems engineer, then you absolutely do needs to know all of this stuff.

And I bet you they'd navigate stuff like better than a systems engineer, because that's more useful to their day to day!

[lambdaone]

Exactly. You don't need to really know how to program to use web frameworks, and web programmers are much cheaper than systems engineers. It's a no-brainer in short-term business terms. But there's a always a price to be paid for decisions like this, and this overhead is it.

Experience of similar tradeoffs tells us it will only get worse over time, and LLM-generated web programming will make the whole process get even worse even faster.