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Agreed. It feels like fitting pre-cut puzzle pieces. Reading code/documentation has become the most important skill.

The amount of working software engineers who don't understand basic things like paging or the TCP/IP protocol or file systems is unnerving.

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What could be the reason though? Too much abstraction these days? I have worked with experienced devs that have a background in Computer Science, who don't grasp basic concepts (especially when it comes to computer networking). Could it be that the emphasis in current CS education is more on theory rather than application in the real world? These days, there are more Software Engineering curriculum style studies popping up at Universities that get rid of the hardcore academic CS fluff you'd only need if you plan to stay in academia, and focus on real world applications. Perhaps that would help more.

theres too much stuff to memorize nowadays... its getting more complex every decade. e.g. If you have to load up in your brain XYZ security details about a certain cloud provider, and also understand caching, scaling, load balancing etc in a cloud environment, why would the person actively keep their 'OS paging' knowledge fresh the mind, its wasted real-estate. maybe certain developers with photo-graphic memory can do it, where they never forget _anything_ they learn. but most developers I work with have forgotten what they haven't used in 5-10 years

My point is that many software engineers don't really understand things you mentioned: load balancing, caching, scaling, etc. in depth and proceed with a high-level understanding to use tools that implement the low-level logic without fully understanding it. I'm not saying it's all of them but a significant number of them use the black-box approach.

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