I'm 39 and have been doing things in this realm since my teens. C64 was my first computer and I still know how to POKE my way around them.
There's a lot of great programmers coming up, but I often find their depth of knowledge to be limited. They can get to elegant solutions, but when it comes to how it fits into a larger distributed system architecture, security, scalability or long term maintainability they seem to start falling short. I've watched a lot of less experienced engineers want to just hit the "reset" button nonstop during an AWS outage, for hopes that resetting the system will clear up the problem and not intuiting the likely causes and consequences.
They simply need more time to expand out their layers of knowledge and experience. It will happen over time! I do feel that I was born of an era when many of the layers were more obvious to interact with and less abstracted. It is easy for a developer to get many years into their career and never interact with assembly these days - such was far less likely in the early 80's unless you wanted to only run slow BASIC programs forever.
There's a lot of great programmers coming up, but I often find their depth of knowledge to be limited. They can get to elegant solutions, but when it comes to how it fits into a larger distributed system architecture, security, scalability or long term maintainability they seem to start falling short. I've watched a lot of less experienced engineers want to just hit the "reset" button nonstop during an AWS outage, for hopes that resetting the system will clear up the problem and not intuiting the likely causes and consequences.
They simply need more time to expand out their layers of knowledge and experience. It will happen over time! I do feel that I was born of an era when many of the layers were more obvious to interact with and less abstracted. It is easy for a developer to get many years into their career and never interact with assembly these days - such was far less likely in the early 80's unless you wanted to only run slow BASIC programs forever.