Programming has turned into gluing together mystery meat. You can't make a business case for essentially writing every library you need. It would take too long to have anything like modern stuff. So you always deal with a huge pile of unknowns all of the time. The job consists more of the meta-skill of navigating unchartered waters intelligently, but you get dinged for doing the real job and people doing a terrible job get the rewards. The bad people glue the stuff together without trying to understand it, don't document stuff, pull in any dependency that gets them closer to their goal, and put up a victory flag when the thing does what they want it to do. Then the war goes on day by day dealing with under-documented stuff and a giant pile of dependencies with no internal logic. The hero goes on to do it again, and a team of saps tries to make sense of a Gordian knot for the rest of the product's lifetime.