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I know we have a lot of bootcamps and people are joining because it pays decently, but is this necessarily a good thing for the industry?
When we have the next industry crash (.com crash) will these people stick around?
I feel like the people who jumped into boot camps to make a quick buck will move on to the next hot thing
I'd like to think that the people who are in the industry because they actually enjoy the challenges and problem solving will stick around
What I think matters: are they going to be effective at their job at your company? If they don’t know these basics I wouldn’t want them as an employee. Go back to school kid
The Java app at my current company does 23k database queries uncached for a directory listing with 100 files in a folder. There are two devs at work there for years, nobody bothered to look up the rather well documented api docs that just use a single query for that task from the upstream software we use.
Personally I'm frustrated and I'm looking to learning more CS to get a job that values quality over quantity.
I feel that the Open Source ecosystem has made building software a lot easier.
Also, the sheer number of software engineers have gone up. 20 years ago those who chose to become software engineers where often very passionate about it. Today, it’s like any other trade, you get a larger variety of people.
My last point is that organisations have also matured and know more about what to expect from software engineers. When I started programming professionally I had a lot more time to finish any given feature, today everything needs to get out the door faster.
Overall, I think we are building better software today.
Sure there are some things that aren't emphasised as much but most of them aren't super useful. JavaScript, css, and mobile development are way more useful today than algorithms, cpu pipelines etc...
Most of the last round of unicorns you could build without any of the items you mentioned, but you couldn't even get started without an understanding of modern web or mobile development.
This is coming from someone who is by no means an expert on any of those things but took a bunch of courses on them in college and have only used them a handful of times in the last decade of professional software development to eek out very small performance improvements.
Doing constant progress (learning) both - modern and everyday useful things meanwhile not giving up at things like security, protocols, lower level stuff, hardware requires a lot of discipline.