When I was starting out, I did design, frontend dev, backend dev, and ops work. Over the last 15 years these positions have all split into specializations: design was the first to go, then ops. The split between frontend and backend opened up in the middle of the last decade, and continues to split even further into controller and model devs on the back end and Javascript and CSS people on the frontend.
The increasingly popularity of frameworks stems from this specialization. It's more important than ever to have separation of concerns, because as apps get larger, individual devs are doing smaller and smaller sections of the work.
Young programmers don't know less than us -- they know way more than we do, but on a much narrower range.
I really don't agree with this, design/dev have always been different specializations, serious javascript has only appeared in the last few years and I've only seen people actually describing themselves exclusively as a 'frontend dev' in the last 6 months.
And 'frontend dev' at the moment seems to be as malleable as a SEO was, sometimes it means a designer who can add jQuery and a couple of modules to a page, sometimes it means a talented javascript programmer with an in depth knowledge of HTML/CSS.
And young programmers can't know way more than older programmers, if you keep learning.
When I was starting out, I did design, frontend dev, backend dev, and ops work. Over the last 15 years these positions have all split into specializations: design was the first to go, then ops. The split between frontend and backend opened up in the middle of the last decade, and continues to split even further into controller and model devs on the back end and Javascript and CSS people on the frontend.
The increasingly popularity of frameworks stems from this specialization. It's more important than ever to have separation of concerns, because as apps get larger, individual devs are doing smaller and smaller sections of the work.
Young programmers don't know less than us -- they know way more than we do, but on a much narrower range.