They don't even know the fundamentals
&gt; not every programmer is dealing with performance issues as part of their job. Some has also specialized in writing GUIs and are more concerned with the user experience and making the user interfaces pretty.<p>This is a really important point that we don’t talk about enough, because everyone gets uncomfortable and feels judged. But I can’t help myself, and I think there’s a lot more to dissect here.<p>I think programming is slowly bifurcating. We’re growing into two disciplines.<p>One discipline requires deep systems knowledge. A CS degree is recommended and if you can’t reverse a binary tree on a white board then you won’t be able to read our code base. Developers in this camp work on rendering engines, Vulcan drivers and schedulers. They spend lunch telling stories about that one time we wrote a game engine in J. Or arguing about type systems.<p>The second group makes most of the software (measured by lines of code). And almost all the software humans actually interact with. They spend their time working around weird safari quirks, arguing about electron, and enjoying the sense of ease and mastery that comes from staying in a single ecosystem for a decade. Getting better at their job looks like getting better at talking to users and customers, making on point estimates and making sure the team releases on time.<p>The part that gets all of us in trouble is that the first skill set is (arguably) harder - and thus much more prestigious. Everyone wants to be seen as an electrical engineer, not an electrician. So people write “software engineer” on their resumes. And then cry foul when they get assessed as a member of that first group. “I’ve never needed to know about red black trees in my career. It’s stupid for anyone to ask about it in an interview. Everyone just crams leetcode. JQuery isn’t flashy but it works and I can solve real problems with it. Hire me you fools, and I’ll show you!”. They’re sort of right. We’re just collectively confused about what sort of job they’re being hired for.<p>I think this confusion hurts everyone. I once wore my fancy engineering hat at a normal consulting gig. I coded up a complex solution to a tricky problem they had and called it a day. After I left, nobody on the team could understand or maintain some of the code I wrote. That caused huge problems for my client after I left. I think they might have regretted bringing me on board at all.<p>But we can’t even talk about this because we don’t have the language. We treat application developers like they’re just junior, in training versions of deep CS systems engineers. But practicing building kick-arse iOS apps doesn’t make you magically good at data structures. And vice versa - doing performance work doesn’t make you good at working with clients. (Ask me how I know). The majority of professional programmers do plumbing &#x2F; user facing software. We need to destigmatise this stuff so people can be hired explicitly for these roles, based on the right set of skills.