[panda_person]

But isn't this the way it is in tech? No one cares if you have a solid grasp of the fundamentals that rarely (if ever) change. Its all about knowing the trendy platform/language du jour. Which, I'd think, is a bad thing-it encourages people to hop onto fads to learn in order to get jobs, but I'm not sure if it really encourages people to learn fundamentals.

[zxcdw]

Depends greatly on the domain. While certainly true for areas in which products are created within months if not weeks and new technologies come and go every few months, it's very different for areas in which product development stage lasts for years and active product maintenance lasts for a decade or two.

It seems that further the domain is away from the fundamental concepts, the more it relies on ad-hoc stuff. I guess that's what abstraction layers and exposure to "general public" does, lots of leaky abstractions going to all directions imaginable. Perhaps someone finds this progress fascinating, I certainly don't.